There is SO much I don't know...but I'm figuring out better questions to ask.

Every time I meet with the existing team, I have a million more questions.  Which I guess is a good thing.  Sometimes I feel like, I'm not asking the right ones with the time we have and we jump all over the place.  Over the weekend, I think we pretty much all agreed that crowdfunding is still a really good, possibly the most viable option for getting this off the ground and it will take a very committed person to run it (possibly me, but we are going to have to talk about getting paid). Meanwhile, for this tiny essentially family business lab, the bootstrapping stage is getting a little tapped.  Also, this notion  of trying Indiegogo comes from being in contact with their leadership and more so, from the tons of little tests I've been doing soft-pitching everyone I've seen in the past month, in addition to some pretty broad market research I've been too informally conducting...up until today.

After coming to the agreement that we'd like to try crowdfunding again, discussing the ways we would make it attractive this potential market, it was getting clear to me that we might be on very different pages about where they want it to go vs. what my sometimes too easily excited self was thinking.  

Here's the thing though, we have yet to discuss the real end game.  Is this going to be a business? Are we going to have a final product, or just scientific knowledge to sell/license to a company, ie GNC (whom the lab already has a business relationship with). 

Our 3-person conversations tend to move very quickly from topic to topic and involve a lot of each of us getting clarification on jargon and concepts and all the while I had been assuming I knew the goal, or that there was an actual defined one

 I finally remembered to squeezed in the "What is the goal here?   Do you actually want to make the supplement for pets? Can we offer maybe a trial of it to everyone who donates a specific amount?  Is this separate from the lab's main business?  If we just crowdfund for the purpose of the research, is this a missed opportunity to both make money and impact the lives of animals nearly immediately? Is GDF11 going to cause cancer? What should we call it, just GDF11? If we do, are we taking all the responsibility of creating mass literacy in the market in terms what it even is?"  

The meeting ended with a a decision to have a more formal meeting at the labs offices' this Thursday with the lab's CEO, and so I'm looking forward to more clarity on the goals.  Since ALL of the marketing/communication strategy will be based on it.  I'm feeling a little ridiculous that it took this long to realize what a key component was missing.

We read and talked a lot about Marketing Strategy last week and this probably my favorite part of a venture, and really a place where I have the most related experience.  Very basically, I feel like I have good sense of different market segments and how we can connect to each of them, who our target market should be to start and at least a sense of how to research competition.  But branding is where I start to feel really unsure, probably because I don't know what our goal is.  I have a sense of what my vision, mission and goals would be but I won't know until Thursday if those are truly realistic.

In preparation for this meeting, I wanted to look at some of the Unreasonable Institute Fellows have put together their concepts and teams.  I really like the direct and simple questions they have their fellows answer, here is a link to Mingawale's questiosn and answers, which was one of the more related ventures I read about.  http://unreasonableinstitute.org/profile/mingawale/  

Meanwhile, since most of the above reflections stemmed from our readings and Mark Heckmann's presentation.  I had some thoughts on that as well, it'll be interesting to talk about as a class.  

What stuck with me the most from Mark's experience was how much funders/markets almost seem to want you to give them something like something else, which is why eventually the unique idea of hooking up students with freelance opportunities has turned into what looks like a lot of of other things.  Flexibility is important, but since the original unique vision/mission and corresponding goals are gone, does it still stand a chance against a pretty saturated market full of similar tools?

Ultimately I'm thinking about how HARD but how still cool it seems to do the whole entrepreneur thing, yet relatedly to how much Mark must have had to come to terms with how much everyone will inevitably be judging everything you do and say.  Even being conscious of this, as a member of the audience, I was judging Mark from the moment he walked in the room to the moment we left, and it definitely a mix of objectively positive and negative.   As so much of your venture depends the impression you give people, and we read so much about it, but when you go over the top to follow all the advice out there, I think thats when you start to feel like that used car salesmen.  There's some balance between being credible/engaging and giving that egotistical/not really listening impression that this short but sweet video below talks about.  No question that he's accomplished a lot, but how do you guys feel about Mark's style?

http://www.businessinsider.com/great-first-impression-people-like-you-instantly-2014-6#ooid=15bGJhbjqzCQBdKMttUddWFXmhum3Grg