ENGR 497B: Advanced Entrepreneurship Teams Spring 2016

Individual Reflection Paper

Robin Jamesa
a
Dept. of Aerospace Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University park, PA 16802

Did you accomplish your goals for your new product/service concept? Explain.

We as a team had a great start at 3DS when we were able to convey the problem to students
not just from the STEM background but also from other non-engineering disciplines just to
figure out how students learn and how cell phones can be utilized as a teaching and learning
tool in classrooms.
In this course, it was a little harder to explain the problem even though we had a lucid picture
of the problem in our mind. This is where we consumed a lot of time which could have been
utilized in developing the product (mobile app) itself and learning to code it even if we were
unsuccessful in our developer hunt.
Even though we were not able to launch the app on the play store, the one on ones really
helped in making us understand programmed learning methodologies by virtue of which we
were able to build 3 key MVPs (The Flash cards, The PowerPoint deck, Prototype App).
These MVPs will lay down the foundation for us to develop the app for the next batch of
students for the AERSP 410 course.

What are 3 key learnings from the course that you believe you will use in the future? Be
specific in terms of the learning and the potential application. This does not have to be
in a startup or as an entrepreneur.

Understanding the mindset of the customer by means of customer discovery and customer
journey maps was something really interesting to learn which I believe will be very useful
and is applicable when you are trying to build any product in the industry and sell it.
Personas were a great way to understand what the crux of the problem is for our customers
and to see how realistic our assumptions were and how close or far they were from the norm.
Personas are very useful in the industry as well to formulate your marketing strategy.
When it comes to starting your own business it is imperative to understand that there will be
pitfalls and it is not necessary that we are successful from the get go. As we saw in the Lean
start-up book, the author had many issues to kick start his company and build it into a
successful venture. It will be very important as to how we learn from our mistakes just as
Eric Ries did.

What activities/actions do you wish you had done/attempted in this class that you did
not? Discuss why you wish you had done/attempted to do each.

Aaron Brookes was a great help but was still unable to answer a lot of questions about how
we could form an LLC and about formulating a partnership agreement which was later

covered by Tom Sharbaugh in class. We would have loved to have formed an LLC and have
partnership agreements by the end of the semester.
In our one-on-one meetings we had spoken about finding a coder/developer on numerous
occasions, but we were unable to do so. Having a coder/developer on board would have
given us a head start and we could have had numerous iterations on an actual app.
Our goal towards the end of the semester was to build an app that we could launch in the app
store and which the students and professors who we spoke to could use and give us a
feedback about.

What entrepreneurship or lean startup topic do you feel was the most useful and why?
Which was not useful and why?

According to me, the topic, Measure from the Lean startup book was the most useful to
me. At the end of the day it is really important to learn how to grow a sustainable business
and to turn leap-of-faith assumptions into quantitative financial models which was well
articulated by the topic on innovation accounting at IMVU.
I felt the topic on competitor analysis was not very useful to us because we were exploring a
very niche market and there werent many direct competitors although I agree that we had a
few indirect competitors. I felt that for us we should have been more focused on building the
app itself rather than focusing on competitors.

What suggestions would you make to restructure or change the course?

One of the suggestions, also made in the one-one meetings was that instead of having a
single 3 hour lecture, it would be more apt to have 2, one and a half hour lectures during the
course of the week. It is very difficult to pay attention in a lengthy 3 hour class.
Deliverables should be assigned after that topic is discussed thoroughly in class. I felt that
most of the deliverables were due on the day they were taught about. There should be some
time given assigning the deliverable and when it is due so that it can also be addressed in the
one-on-one meetings if need be.
I think more emphasis was given to the deliverables (I understand that it is a course which
has to be graded in the end) than development of the product itself. My expectations of the
course were that I will make a progress in the development of the app and that is what I will
be graded on.
The milestones set during the beginning of the class could have been a deliverable which I
believe could have been assigned a little later when we had a little more clarity as to what we
need to do.

What else do you feel you would like to tell us about the class, the experience, and your
learning this semester?

Having five other teams apart from ours with a lot of engineering students was great in terms
of the varied inputs we got to make slight pivots and more clarity in understanding the
problem.

 One of the most valuable skills acquired during the course of this class was making our
pitches pitch perfect after frequently pitching to so many speakers who came to class and
also pitching it at the poster session in the IST startup week.
I believe the exercise where we had to pitch the idea of the teams sitting next to us (I think it
was the pitch we made to Linda) was a brilliant one. It told us and all the other teams how
much the students in the class itself have understood the idea.
The mentorship provided by Dr. Liz and Dr. Lee was immensely valuable. I think it was
important to get significantly different ideas from both mentors which led us in different
directions of overall growth and improvement of the company. Their assistance was
indispensable in terms of the new network connections we made which will really be helpful
to pursue this idea further.
Impromptu Pitching in the Management 215 class was a little scary cause we werent really
prepared but it was also challenging because the audience were a potential customer. The
response received was fabulous and the questions posted by the students was great. Even
though our pitch wasnt up to the mark it did help us in improving our pitch for the poster
session in the IST startup week.
Finally, witnessing the Idea-maker challenge was a great experience. It was good to rank
teams and to draw conclusions from a thorough analysis of all the pitches and their strengths
and weaknesses.