Surveys & More

This week in class, we looked over the Apple patent and discussed all the little details that go into framing a patent, and even how often people create similar things both before and after a patent is published. We tried to apply this to our patent, basically finding that the proprietary knowledge is the early warning network linked to the device.

We also created a customer survey that launched this week- feel free to take it here! This will allow us to further track down our target customer market and help us in later weeks to market our product and form a better business model. We also reached back out to Professor Joshua Bloom (who was busy last week) and will be meeting with him Thursday morning. We'll be forming a list of questions as a group to prepare for the meeting. Some of those include asking if we can see an actual prototype of the product or if he has any images of it, and what he thinks of our proposed business models.

Group Blog: Dream Team

Side note: my team's group blog can be viewed here! We'll be posting our weekly updates and any blog/vlog posts on there going forward.

Target Markets

We hit a bit of a bump-in-the-road this week, which was a little disappointing considering we had been progressing so quickly. We were unable to contact the professor we had been talking to about our patent, which pushed back all our plans to discuss our business model ideas and questions about the product with him. Instead, we opted to work more on the customer side and began to develop a survey to send out to our target customer profile. We also worked a bit more on our value proposition-which Rick and Tal had said was already pretty good and would just need minor edits- to perfect it. Overall, I think our group is doing quite well and we seem to be a bit ahead of the rest of the class. Hopefully this week doesn't push us back too much.

Finding Customers

For week 7, we started focusing on potential customers for our product. We each interviewed a friend or family member and got their input on if they'd use the app or device and how it relates to their daily lives. I interviewed a friend who graduated from Cal two years ago and now lives in New York, working in finance. He said this product isn't too appealing since things like earthquakes and tornadoes aren't an issue in Manhattan and that since he rents an apartment, he's not as concerned with property damage.

This made us realize that we'd have to be careful about targeting our customers, and that we can't simply assume that everyone would find this useful.