Contracts and Companies

Recently we have drafted a contract to give to businesses we are interested in offering our service. This will show the legitimacy of our service and also show exactly what we have to offer the businesses; as well as how they can help us. After this class we will re-visit Jimmy John's and Tutti Gusti to have the contracts with us to diminish time spent meeting and negotiating with these restaurants before coming to an actual agreement. We have also been researching Groupon's website, after Professor Wales recommendation. We found this statement on Groupon's website and we feel that it aligns perfectly with the goal of our business:

"Groupon negotiates huge discounts-usually 50-90% off-with popular businesses. We send the deals to thousands of subscribers in our free daily email, and we send the businesses a ton of new coustomers. That's the Groupon magic."

We hope to somehow replicate this model except on a smaller scale, with a more focused niche to have a goal discount range for businesses, limiting the use our service to busnisses' deals that are in the same 50-90% off range. Through our research we also learned how Groupon deals are not activated unless a certain number of customers buy them. We are currently trying to incorporate some version of this into our venture, however it will have to be modified severely because once we send out our text it will be active and able to be used by all subscribers. Lastly, Groupon encourages users to share the deals with friends and we are going to encourage that as well by allowing users to forward the texts to as many people as they would like.

Updated Business Model: October 21, 2011

Getting Feedback from Restaurants

On Tuesday, we went to Jimmy Johns and Tutti Gusti to get feedback from local businesses, and to see if they would be interested in our company. We talked to managers at both places and they sounded interested, but said we needed to bring back formal documentation to show their owners.

Although, Jimmy Johns said that they don't offer any discounts or coupons, they said they could potentially help us by allowing us to work with their marketing team. The manager, shown above, said that their marketing team goes to different places around Harrisonburg everyday and hands out free subs. We are hoping that we can go with the team and sit on the commons and try and get students to sign up for our venture and give us their phone number. In return, they will then get a free Jimmy John’s sub.

We are now in the stages of creating a formal document that we can hand out to all local businesses, when we go to pitch our idea. We intend to have this accomplished by this weekend and on Monday we will go to the rest of the businesses around town and pitch our idea. We then would like to see what business could give us the best deal to use during our Beta testing. We are going to send out a blast text for that one deal, at no charge to the restaurant, as a trial run, to see if students actually come in. After our results we will reevaluate our venture. 

GoDaddy.com and Facebook!

We purchased a domain name through GoDaddy.com for $29.15 and are now in the process of developing a website (ALCasterz.com). We have also made a Facebook event in hopes that this will entice more people to sign up for our services through our blog. We have invited over 600 people to this event so hopefully we’ll get more contacts!

5 Biggest Problems We are Facing

In class on Monday we discussed the five main problems we are facing in creating our venture. The five we came up with were:
1) Getting enough contacts to create value for businesses
2) Finding a compatible and affordable text service
3) Convincing businesses that we can create value for them
4) Should we create a more specific niche?
5) How/Should we limit companies to the amount of texts they can send?

We are still in the process of solving these problems and haven't decided on any permanent solutions at this time. We are currently waiting to hear back from companies and then we will proceed with a trial (beta) run to help us better adjust to what will work best.

Business Model as of October 7, 2011

Changing the Idea

After discovering that it would be tough to expand our original idea in the future, we decided to change the concept completely including our original blog. We then thought about advertising and how we could provide instant blast SMS text messaging to local businesses (mainly food orientated) that would enable them to reach out to consumers when their revenues are slow. One thing we considered early on was that we didn't want these restaurants spamming our pre-gathered potential clientele. So a limit would have to be put in place on how many alerts these businesses could send out per week/day. In order to organize or contact list, we created another page on our blog to facilitate the large quantity of contacts we may acquire. We are currently in the process of finding the best blast SMS text website to fit our business model.

Mocking it Up

It then came to us, we wanted to change up the idea slightly; we now wanted to put a picture of the new Bridgeforth stadium that had a caption relating to this year. after some deliberation, we agreed upon a shirt that would now read, "We saw it First." This T-shirt would create more value than any other because it could be seen as limited time only.

Drawing it Out

Getting the Idea

After deciding on the team name, ALCasterz, we then went to work brainstorming ideas for our business creation. We tried to think of needs college students had that we could satisfy. Right away we came up with the idea of a cleaning service and would clean up for them after a party. We assumed there would be a significant demand, since we live in a college town, and we also thought that we could make a high profit by charging around $20 for an hour of cleaning. After thinking the idea through a little more, we realized that this idea was not ideal. It would have to be very time consuming and the cleaning supplies could get expensive. We also were concerned with safety since we would be entering the home of strangers. Lastly, we were slightly disgusted at the idea of cleaning stranger's toilets. thus, we decided to scratch the cleaning service idea. Since cleaning was not at the top of our list we tried to come up with other carious ideas such as a Sunday Football Catering Service. However, we realized most students that watch games order pizza and/or wings anyways. Eventually we stumbled on the idea of a tee-shirt company. We though there weren't that many tee shirts focusing on tail gating. We realized there would be a lot of problems with selling JMU tailgating shirt in that we would be competing with the bookstore. Finally we decided there could be a market for tee-shirts that focused on the new stadium.