Baby steps: crafting the final project

Succeeding the Catapult fest we had started taking orders and we were also working on the product developments. We were overwhelmed with the appreciation and the feedback that we received for our product. There was a lot happening at the back end to fulfil the commitments we had given to our clients. We started meeting early before our sessions to assign responsibilities in order to increase our efficiency.

 

User Research Follow-up by Nitin Virkar

 

In the fifth week on Monday, Mr. Nitin Virkar came and asked us some serious and thought provoking questions such as :-

1.Where are the kids going to play with this toy?

2.What is the product’s life cycle and what will make him buy it again?

We didn’t have satisfactory answers to these questions. This encouraged us to start thinking from the user’s point of view and to pay attention to minute details to enhance the user experience. Based on this feedback we changed the pellets to make them lighter, less risky and we even added a dartboard behind our instruction manual for the users to play with.

In the previous session we had to do an extensive and qualitative user research of the business ideas that emerged in our Design Thinking Workshop with Nitin Virkar and Dhan Patel and present it to Nitin for his inputs on our research. I was taken aback with the user research that all the partners had come up with and that made me proud to have such determined partners. For example :-

A group of partners planned to start affordable home-cooked food delivery business and for this, they took feedback from some students about the pricing and need for the business. They even delivered their first order to a student as a part of their user research.

Through some challenging questions, Nitin helped us add value to our user research and he also helped us formulate a Problem Statement which we were to solve through our business. This was an extremely intense and stressful exercise. After this that we had an intense brain-storming session to identify our problem statements and this gave us tremendous insight into the impact that we wanted to create through our business.

 

Brain – Storming

 

After such an intense session we decided to dwell into what lies ahead of us for our main/final project as a team. The partners came up with some creative ideas. The idea was to incorporate everybody’s passion and create a Business model. We also wanted to do something that was never done before and from that emerged an idea to create a mega event which will engage people through different passions such as Fitness, Education, Nature trek. This resulted in an idea to create a gaming event on the lines of Takeshi’s castle and try to alter it around our passions. This brain-storming made me realize the potential in our team and how unswerving we were to create something unique.

 

Charcha with Prashant Yadav

 

On 24th Oct the Enterprise team invited us for an evening with an educational entrepreneur, Mr. Prashant Yadav. He is an alumni of IIT but he always wanted to start his own business. He has seen a lot of failures in his life and after all of this he started a company. His company provides English speaking training to clients across the country using a simple technology-Telephone!! It was an open session and so the people that had come for the session were quite diverse, from teenagers to uncles. In that session I learned how we can have amazing personal interactions in small groups with a lighthouse .

Here are a few enriching thoughts I picked up from the story of Prashant-

1. I will not succumb to what people think of me – I define Myself.
2. I will take that career path where I enjoy small victories rather than focusing on the main goal.
3. A business needs to undergo many iterations to stand a chance to succeed.

 

Learning Business Tricks from Mr.Amit Jagtap

 

We had our 3rd Lighthouse session this week of the program – Amit Jagtap, founder of the renowned Skyi Constructions. He is a street-smart action packed businessman whose life story is as inspiring as it gets. He had endured many failures during his engineering life but even then he was very clear that he liked creating things out of nothing. This affinity with creating made him join a construction firm as an employee with astarting salary of Rs.3,000. Thereafter he even became a partner in that same construction firm within 6 years. Throughout his story, the experiences that he had with the owners of the company, whether it was sitting with them till 2 or taking extra responsibilities just so he can learn more to work his way up the ladder was an unbelievable experience for me. His passion about his business reflected by the way he spoke about his experiences. Whether it was a small brochure that increased the sales or the guarantee that he gave to his customers.

There are a lot of learnings from that session but some learnings that I have taken to heart-

1. Work as if you own the company even if you are just an employee.
2. Your bond with your partner should be as strong as Marriage.

After such an inspiring session we started discussing our ideas from last week with him and he had only one powerful advice – Start your business prototype without thinking about the monetary value of it. Don’t keep waiting for a billion dollar idea but just start.

 

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

 

On Monday we started analyzing where we stand currently with our toy order completion process. We created a Work Breakdown Structure i.e. to divide the process into sub-types and assigning people with a responsibility to accomplish them.

The next day, we started fulfilling our roles and by the end of the day, we had successfully completed 86 orders, which was a small but essential morale booster for us.

 

Life Lessons with Malhar Ganla

 

Malhar Ganla is an Iron man and a fitness expert by profession who has more than 300 fitness trainers in his team across the country. He realized very late in his life about his passion but when he did, he left his wife and young kids in India to stay in New Zealand for around 1 year. He has undergone his fitness training in New Zealand and started his own Fitness based Company in India. He was our 4th Lighthouse and we consider ourselves quite lucky to have interacted with him first-hand. His life has had more ups and downs then one could even imagine but the smile on his face, while he was narrating his experiences, made us realize that it was all worth it!

He made us understand that how important it is to find something that gets you out of your bed every morning to truly enjoy your life. One thing that stood out from his experiences was his ability to be unbiased in your listening i.e. without any agenda and listen what they want to say and not what you want to hear. From our learnings from the previous session about how “Passion was something that you can endure pain for”, Malhar made us realize that we should not just be passionate about our profession/work but also be passionate about everything , for ex-passionate son, passionate father.

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We learned about how we should stick to our process and have faith that it will lead us to the next stage. One should always have a fertile mind and be ready to learn because everyone and everything can teach you something.

When asked about how we can stay motivated about our exercise, he had a very different approach towards it. He made us understand that it should be an Autotelic Experience which means doing something without looking for the result but just doing it for yourself and not for others. This way you stay motivated because it becomes a part of your daily routine and something which you can’t avoid.

 

Creating a Wholesome Family Event

 

We started discussing our event ideas with Malhar and came up with an interesting idea to create an offline real life version of the popular online multiplayer game PUBG. Then to take it a step further we decided to widen the target demographic age from teens to grandparents. We discussed and realized that there are not a lot of activities in India for grand-parents and there are even fewer activities where the grandparents and children can both be a part of. The grandparents have the financial power to support such activities but some of them don’t have grandchildren and so decided to think further on this. We started thinking around the idea to create an event that brings families together for an amazing experience.