University of Florida student Jonathan Katz can be both a domain expert in the industry and a domain expert on the market. He was the inventor of Qwerk, which is an app that is used by people in Gainesville, primarily by University of Florida students, to make money completing small tasks, or to pay for people to do small tasks for you. Since my product, SafeCard is an app, Jonathan Katz could help me design the app, as well as help me market it to college students in the area, as I am trying to do. I have found this person through knowledge and word of mouth about the app, and contacted Jonathan through linked in. He gave me advice on developing an app, and a ballpark amount of money it would take to get the app up and running. For marketing ideas, he mentioned his promo video, where he got well known UF students to participate in the video and share it with their friends, who then shared it with their friends. The video has over 55,000 views now. In addition to Jonathan, almost anyone in the industry of marketing would be able to help with the marketing of my product, because beyond the people of Gainesville, my product relates to almost every demographic, and can be successful in any market.
Priyanka Kotian of Thane, India, could be a supplier to my business. Kotian is a manager at Euclid analytics, which is a location tracking company. They could supply the tracking chip device necessary to make the credit card look alike tracker. I searched the employees of this Euclid company on linked in and sent an "Inmail" message to one of the managers who looked like they worked in sales. They replied that they do not have a sort of chip that I am looking for, but other options. This means I would have to tweak my idea a little, but that some version of my product is still possible.
Before this assignment, I had never reached out to anyone on linked in. I had also not spent a lot of time on linked in searching companies or the employees of these companies, so that was really interesting for me. This experience will definitely change my networking events in the future, because now I am much more comfortable with messaging strangers on linked in and asking for help or advice.
I think using linkin to find people was a great idea. It is a great resource for professionals to find other people working in the field. My product also works using a tracking device. It can be very frustrating trying to find the perfect thing for your product. Unlike yours I need a flexible or very tiny tracker that can fit in to a child’s bracelet.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t do this post but here is a link to my blog: http://ent3003blog.blogspot.com/
Hey, so I am also basing my business idea on an application. I think finding someone who works directly with applications and successful ventures involving programming knowledge was a great idea, and I also made sure to do the same for my exercise's "domain expert" part. It seems to me that your marketing expert is also your domain expert? I'm not 100% sure if that's the case from what I read, but if it is, then I cant say I did the same there. I found someone else to inform me of the market as well as of the supplies. Great job overall!
ReplyDeleteAlso, check out my blog post:
http://sebastianent3003.blogspot.com/2016/03/growing-my-social-capital.html
Hi! I think it is great that you were able to find one person that could qualify into two of your categories, it would definitely help in the long run if you were to actually farther this idea. Also being able to reach out to people on line is really great! If you are interested this is my post here http://anaksunamoon216.blogspot.com/2016/03/growing-my-social-capital.html
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