Background
Through the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the Foster School of Business, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in the Creating a Company course series. This required students to form teams develop a business plan for a new venture, present our plans to a panel of investors, obtain funding, run the business, and exit the firm at the end of the second quarter (20 weeks).
My team, made up of differing perspectives and schools, came together on something that we were all passionate about — cooking. We created Savora Spice Co. – a spice blend company dedicated to revolutionizing the the conventional spice landscape.
Results
After 10 weeks of planning and analyzing our business and another 10 weeks of following our plan, selling, and being scrappy, we were able to successfully be profitable by $1.5k, launching two products, and hosting a week-long retail space agreement with Microsoft.
Objective
Our objective was clear but far from easy: Conceive, iterate, and launch a successful product to market after developing a business plan and pitching to investors to receive initial funding.
Solution
We began our journey through discovering the pain points that motivated our company. We, my college-student-teammates, frequently ran into the issue of having subpar cooking abilities and frequently cooking bland food. We needed to get confirmation that this pain point was also felt by others, ensuring a product-market fit.
We ran customer discovery surveys to discover who our customers were, what their needs & wants were, and what insights could we get from their cooking habits to better tailor our product.
Once we analyzed the results, we gained confirmation that there was a potential target market and began creating our strategy program and pitch to investors.
We created a competitor analysis matrix highlighting the differentiating factors from us and our competitors. We looked at the differing sales channels and the percentage that we would focus on. We came to the conclusion of them through analysis of effort, time, resources, and returns.
Additionally, we had to develop our total ask amount and create a cost and return analysis to determine how much we would make through sales forecasting and estimated costs.
Once we were approved for the investment amount, we began to track our progress through a Gantt Chart and Kanban Boards on Notion. I would lead weekly meetings with my team and help create a standup deck for our updates to the class and professor.