Assignment 19A - Idea Napkin No. 2

1)    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 Javier Chacon and I am a 3^rd year Finance major here at the University of Florida. After interviewing the 5 people that I feel are closest to me and reflecting over my own unique characteristics that contribute to my human capital, I can see that my biggest talents are financial/data analysis and my work ethic. My past experience operating my own online business has given me experience with marketing, communicating, and selling directly to customers in both an online and in-person setting. I also was able to further develop my financial analysis skills through utilizing Microsoft Excel to track my finances and identify areas where I could improve in order to maximize profit.

·      If I were to start this business, I would see it playing a very significant role in my life. I am very passionate about everything that I do and once I start something, I put in 100% of my effort and time into it. The purpose of my product is to decrease abduction/sexual assault rates worldwide and I think that the fact that my business concept could have a positive impact on many people’s lives will inspire and push me to continue to improve my business.

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

·      I would say that what I am offering to customers has not really changed from the first idea napkin. I am offering consumers a product that will provide them with additional safety protection and peace-of-mind. My business concept is to create clothing accessories, such as rings, bracelets, and necklaces, as well as chips that can be inserted into any article of clothing. These accessories and chips would contain a “distress” button that, when pressed, would alert the authorities and emergency contacts of your choice and provide them with your live location. The technology is currently available and my goal is to modify this technology so that it can be better utilized for personal safety. Abduction rates are very high in this country, with almost 2000 children every day that go missing, and even though sexual assault rates have begun to decline, they are still very high. My product aims at solving consumer’s unmet need of personal safety protection and provides them with assurance that they will have a greater chance of a positive outcome if anything were to happen to them.

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?

·      This part has not really changed too much. I am primarily targeting female college students and families. My reasoning in targeting these two groups is that I am 100% confident that those are the two groups who face the need the most. With the increased awareness and exposure now of sexual assaults on college campuses, I think my product provides additional assurance to female college students that will aid them if they were ever faced with that situation. In addition, families would be more inclined to purchase this product for their children, with child abduction rates still predominantly high. Families want to make sure that their children stay safe and protected, something that my product can provide to ease their mind. I would say that all of my customers have a common need of wanting to stay safe. In today’s world, there has been unfortunately a lot of crazy stuff happening and everyone just wants to be safe. My product aims at trying to do that exact thing and to ease people’s mind’s a little bit knowing that they have a product that will help keep them safe.

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. 

·      Consumers care because their personal safety is one of their highest priorities. We are only given one life to live, so it is very important that we do everything that we can to protect ourselves. My product cannot promise to 100% eliminate the risk of anything negative happening to the consumer, however what it does do is protect consumers and provide them with a greater chance of a positive outcome. The primary goal of my product is to decrease abduction/sexual assault rates and to provide victims with a greater chance of a better outcome through increased response times. One of the biggest problems when dealing with abductions/sexual assaults is locating the victims and my product directly handles this through the “distress” button that sends out live location to the police and emergency contacts.

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

·      From all of the search that I have conducted, there are currently zero competitors with a product similar to mine that sends out live location to authorities/emergency contacts. The closest thing to a competitor is honestly the Life Alert, and that does not contain the live location feature and is primarily targeted towards senior citizens. What sets my product apart is the advanced technological capability to be able to send live location to authorities/emergency contacts, leading to faster response times to these crimes. Other personal safety accessories, such as pepper spray necklaces or alarm necklaces, obviously haven’t been affective or have not been marketed effectively because otherwise the rates for these crimes would be going down much faster. I have connections with individuals with engineering/computer science/programming backgrounds that I think would be great assets in bringing this product to life. When looking at my current network and the overall landscape of the industry, I think I have what it takes to take my concept to the next level and make it a success.

6)    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. 

·      When looking at all 5 of these elements, I believe that all of them fit together very nicely.  I really don’t think that any of my elements are weaker than another, just because I have done a lot of research in determining how effective my product could be and who would be the main consumers to purchase my product. The connections that I have make it very possible to bring this concept to life and to continue to improve the overall design of my product. The media is doing a great job right now on bringing light towards abduction/sexual assault crimes and this increased awareness will only broaden up the market for my product. The need for personal safety is a very serious one and offering a product that can help improve that need is very important in satisfying the current market.

7)    Feedback Memo: 

·      One important piece of feedback that I received directly addressed the product concept. Someone commented on my post suggesting that I think about adding a microchip that can be inserted into any article of clothing with the same technological capabilities as the accessories. I decided that this was actually a brilliant idea, as it offers a more discrete product that can be transferred from one article of clothing to another. This could also potentially lead down the line to the chips being licensed with different clothing manufacturers to create “smart-tech” clothing that aims at solving the personal safety need.

·      Another piece of important feedback that I received involved the landscape of the industry. Since there are no direct competitors to my product, I had someone ask me what, if any, were the alternatives to my product. I was able to conduct more research on alternative products and found out that there really wasn’t much out there to compete with my product. Other than pepper spray necklaces, taser bracelets, or alarm necklaces, there is a lack of personal safety products that utilize the current technology that we have today. I think that in mentioning this in my idea napkin, I provide more information about the landscape of the industry and why my product has serious potential to become successful.