Long hours but lots of learning.

The beginning of this week has been pretty rough. 

On Monday, after school, I took a bus back to Isla Vista. I had lunch at home, and then I hit the library. Not that I didn't already expect so… But I realized that my E-Launch class is really hard, and there is A LOT of work to it. Being a 1-day class, it requires more discipline and responsibility, because you need to be able to spread the work throughout the week, otherwise you'll end up crammed and overwhelmed on Sunday and Monday night, like it happened to me and my partner Isaac.

This week is Week 6, and Week 6 is the week of Pitch #2. Pitch #2 is a 2-minute pitch like all other pitches, but its focus is on the analysis and description of the Industry, Intellectual Property, and Competition for our business. In case you didn't read my previous post in which I talk about Enterprise Launch (or E-Launch), ENT 206 is an Entrepreneurship class in which students work on an idea and launch a business in one semester. In order to do this, a lot of research and “figuring-things-out” are essential every single week. In the upcoming weeks, we will need to research, analyze, and get ready to present in front of judges important elements of a business such as the target market and marketing strategy, customer validation, use of funds, exit strategy, and the presentation of a working prototype.

Isaac and I ended up doing all the research for Pitch #2 on Sunday night and Monday afternoon, and we spent Monday night putting together a speech and a power point presentation. Since our idea involves an app that provides a service that deals with physical products, figuring out what industry our business fits in was a little confusing, but we decided our industry will be that of online bartering services, which connects to the service that our app will provide. This is a $12+ billion industry in constant expansion, with over 450,000 companies in the United States alone.

We worked very hard to put together a presentation, and I finished writing the speech at 2am. At that point, I left the library and biked home. 

On Tuesday, my alarm goes off around 7:30 am, so I was tired the whole day. I have been busy with work and classes until around 2:30pm, and after that, I went back to edit the speech, but it’s really hard to cut it down to only 2 minutes. 

Finally, I started memorizing the speech around 4pm, and class starts at 5:30. This is a very stressful and very much not efficient way to approach tasks, and I do not recommend it. Everybody procrastinates sometimes, but Isaac and I would agree that procrastination is the worst choice one can take if you want to succeed in ENT 206, and in entrepreneurship in general. 

For our next speech, we are planning get on it way in advance, so we will have time to edit it, practice, and memorize it to perfection.

When I got home at 9pm I was exhaust. That is alright though. After all, “long hours” appears in every description of Entrepreneurship... It is part of the game! ;)

A Presto,

- Fede