11A – Idea Napkin No. 1

1) You. Who you are. What your talents are. What your skills and experiences are. Also: what are your aspirations? Specifically regarding your business concept, how do you see this business (if you were to start it) playing a role in your life?

My name is Jacob Tillinger and I’m a first-year business information systems major. I plan on applying to the Master of Information Systems and Operational management combined degree program. I have a talent for working with computers and learning new technology easily. I have multiple technical skills such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I have a passion for starting my own business such as a restaurant chain. I see this business taking up a lot of time in my life since I would run it and make sure that everything runs smoothly.

2) What are you offering to customers? Describe the product or service (in other words, how you'll solve customers' unmet needs). 

I am solving the customer's problem by providing them with authentic Israeli food that isn’t available in certain areas.

3) Who are you offering it to? Describe, in as much detail as possible, the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your customers. Think especially of this question: what do your customers all have in common?

My restaurant would attract people of all different races and from different areas. My customers would all relate in that they all love a variety of healthy natural food.

4) Why do they care? Your solution is only valuable insofar as customers believe its valuable to them. Here, explain why customers will actually pay you money to use your product or service. 

Customers would pay me money to use my service because it is a healthy restaurant that only uses all-natural ingredients. It would be the most famous Israeli chain around.

5) What are your core competencies? What sets you apart from everyone else? Also: what do you have that nobody else has? 

What sets me apart from everyone else is my motivation to find the best chefs and start up the restaurant. What I have that nobody else is diversity.

In addition to these five elements, please spend a paragraph evaluating whether you believe these elements fit together or whether there are aspects of your business concept that are weaker / out-of-joint with the others. 

I believe these elements work together, but I definitely need to spend a lot more time on finding the right location to start my first restaurant. I need to find a city that has no Israeli restaurants and open the first one up there so that I have no competition. I feel that I have the right business skills to start up this restaurant and I know who to offer my service to. I believe that the market could use this type of restaurant chain.

10A – Elevator Pitch No. 1

9A – Testing the Hypothesis, Part 2

Who: After conducting my interviews, I found that no group falls outside my boundaries because everyone wants to end texting and driving. Everyone I interviewed said that they wish there are more harsh laws for texting and driving. Even phone companies create billboard ads to prevent people from texting and driving.

What: My interviews helped me come to the conclusion that this need is different from just texting and driving. This need is to stop people from looking at their phones all together whether they are walking or driving. This need should be more enforced especially on school campuses because of all the students walking around.

Why: I think the underlying cause of the outsiders’ need is different than the people inside the boundary. The people that fall outside the boundary are people that simply drive and text themselves.

Inside the Boundary:

Who is in: College students that don’t text and drive and people that don’t look at their phones while driving.

What the need is: The need is to prevent people from getting killed on the road.

Why the need exists: The need exists because of all the good drivers on the road.

Outside the Boundary:

Who is in: College students who are careless drivers and don’t care about the rules of the road.

What the need is: To text people back while driving because they think it’s ok to keep their eyes off the road.

Alternative explanations: This is an opportunity for my app because of all the terrible careless drivers on the road that don’t follow laws.

8A – Solving The Problem

The solution to my problem with texting and driving could be a feature in the car that turns off someone’s phone if they’re sitting in the driver’s seat. This service would allow the person to make a phone call or answer it if they speak a password to the car’s computer. I think this would solve the problem of texting and driving because it would prevent people from looking at their phones while they’re driving their cars. I could sell this service to car dealers and they could build the program into their cars that they sell. The only issue with this service is that it would be complicated to sell it to people that already own an older car. I think this service would work because there are always car accidents shown on the news and a lot of accidents are caused by texting and driving. This service could be advertised everywhere just like how advertisements are made about preventing texting and driving.