ENT3003 Assignment 11A – Idea Napkin No. 1

Piecing It All Together

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 Jared Narzissenfeld, I’ve spent most of my life in the Orlando area including my first 2 years of community college at Valencia. I have since transferred to UF as general business major. I believe my best skills lie in learning and adapting, I find myself capable of adjusting to whatever scenario I’m placed into and learning quickly to become the best I can be at whatever it is I set my mind to. I have large aspirations in terms of success, I hope to become better off than my parents and peers, I hope to let nothing get in my way of being the best person that I can be. I believe that if I were to start this business that it would become something mainstay to my daily life, in such a way that I expressed earlier by my skills. I could easily see my business being something I put full effort into as a means of being as successful as it and I can be, realizing the idea’s full potential.

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

My product will offer customers a substitute to what is currently on the market, and I believe these current products are inferior. I plan to make a mechanical pencil that solves the issues currently found among the major brands, these include problems with lead, reusability, and convenience. My product will have more durable lead with a more structured pencil so that excessive breakage will be prevented. Additionally, this pencil will have features never before seen that will allows users to refill their pencils with minimal effort, saving money for not only the consumer but for the environment too.

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?

I believe the characteristics of my customers can be best described by their demographics, to which I would say is primarily 14-24-year-olds in some level of education from middle school up to university. Furthermore, I believe this product isn’t going to be weighted strongly to other ethnicity’s and such but more focused on age and occupation. I believe most of my customers will be primarily writers rather than people who type on a computer, that is people who prefer to frequently write out their notes and do their work with a pencil as opposed to other options such as a laptop, pen with ink, or just not being much of a writer at all.

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.

I think customers should be willing to spend money for my product as they’re already currently paying for inferior products. Any student that likes to write and chooses lead often uses a mechanical pencil, these pencils can be gone through extremely quickly, I know from personal experience I’ve used anywhere from 5-10 in a single month. Due to the large amount of turnover with pencils I believe people will have a desire to have a pencil they don’t go through as quickly, due to the additional lead in my product, users will choose to purchase it more often as they will be getting a longer-lasting product for a similar price point that will simultaneously be keeping all the thrown away pencils out of the landfills they inevitably end up in, therefore also supporting the environment.

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

I believe what sets me apart from everyone else is determination, I truly believe I could have an inferior product but with my relentless effort and work I could still make it perform better than any more “superior” product. Furthermore, I truly do believe the product I’ve come up with is like nothing on the market and offers a benefit to users in a way that no other product does in its form of improving reusability, allowing one pencil to last longer than any competitive product on the market right now.

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 5 elements actually work together very nicely. There’s a type of synergy built between my personal strengths and competencies and my products capabilities, not to mention the primary target audience for my product is looking for the features that I hope to implement. Moreover, I believe my skills and determination will also allow for a product to be created at minimal costs that will allow for a competitive price point matching the desires of my customers.