While the last couple weeks have been spent finishing the last components of my project, I had a really cool meeting opportunity! Through the alumni house, I was connected with CFO Blake Nolan of Athletic Greens, a member of Severn's class of 1995.
Athletic Greens is a HUGE company in the sports nutrition industry––valued at over $1 billion––and Blake gave me a ton of valuable insight into what it takes to run a company like that and how I could apply similar strategies to Performance Backed. He was incredibly helpful and I look forward to talking with him again soon.
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While finishing up my business plan, I have spent considerable time setting up email flows for multiple different processes on the website. For example, in the picture below, there is a flow for someone who subscribes to the newsletter. At first, it sends them an email thanking them for signing up, then an email requesting a follow on social media to build brand engagement, and lastly an email that shows the customer best selling products.
At this point, I am pretty much done with the major aspects of my project, so I am mainly spending my time doing smaller but important tasks to a theoretical start-up company like this. I have spent the past couple weeks putting the final touches on my business plan and continuing to work on building out my e-commerce website.
Aside from the financial forecasting, the majority of the writing for the plan is complete. In the coming days, I will continue revising the plan and start putting the pieces together for the actual investor pitch. Regarding the website, I have continued designing it and implementing some conversion strategies I have learned over the past year. I have also written a lot of the copy for the website, but I still have some to go. There are multiple moving pieces but I am confident everything will come together.
These past couple weeks have been extremely busy! Firstly, on February 18, I met with Mr. Manickam on Zoom to talk about my upcoming investor pitch, as well as some broader business topics. My full meeting notes are attached to this post. I also further worked on my website. An important part of this process is creating copywriting (the text about a product/company) that accurately depicts my product and is convincing to potential customers. For this current exercise, I am developing my product description. I have revised it each day and attached a picture of the most current copy to this post; and I plan to continue revising it each day in order to make it as effective as possible. In addition to my website, I have worked tirelessly to continue writing my business plan. Recently, I completed the section about the "Opportunity," which includes writing about the problem I'm solving, my solution, my target market, my current competition, and my advantages over my competition. I also worked on outlining the ownership and structure of the company. Lastly, I started crafting email campaigns via a service called Klaviyo for customers (if this was a real company). My current goal is to create email flows for new email subscribers, new customers, first time orders, and abandoned checkouts. With spring break coming soon, I am ready to continue working on my project before the home stretch—it's really starting to come together!
Despite devoting a significant amount of time to preparing my Midterm Fellows Presentation (which can be found here), I have still made great progress on my project in recent weeks. Firstly, I have continued to meet with Mr. Fennell to help write out my business plan. Right now, I hope to have the plan done by the end of March, which I am on track to complete.
Also over the last couple weeks, I have begun developing my e-commerce website for the project, performancebacked.com. After purchasing the domain, I signed up for a Shopify subscription to help build out the store and have begun by drafting the home page. Shopify is a complete commerce platform that lets you start, grow, and manage a business. I have used it in the past for my various business ventures, so I am excited to use it again for this project. While building the website, I will pay particular emphasis to appropriately conveying my brand positioning and brand identity through my design and messaging choices. Overall, I hope to create a fully functioning, high-converting online store (without the selling function). My goal is to finish this site in March, though website development is a task that doesn't really have an end date. Please note, if you visit the website you will be directed to a basic password page not the actual storefront. This Friday, I am meeting with Mr. Manickam to discuss my progress and get advice on future aspects of the project. The last couple weeks have been busy! After meeting with Ms. Johnson and Nick to start work on the logo, I have been continuing to talk to Nick who is hard at work on the logo. The picture attached below is an early draft of the concept.
In addition to the logo, I have spent a significant amount of time beginning to create my business plan. Using the LivePlan software that I purchased a couple months ago, I started writing some important sections to the plan such as the “Problem Worth Solving” (pictured below) and “Our Solution.” I met with Mr. Fennell last week as well, and will begin to start the financial forecasting section of the plan soon with his help. Lastly, I have been busy preparing for my Midterm Fellows Presentation. In addition to finishing the actual presentation slides, I put together a presentation packet that I will be distributing to the faculty at my presentation on February 11. In the coming days, I am going to get it printed out at Staples so it has a professional look. Last week, I met with Nick Ciralo, a friend and skilled apsiring graphic designer at Severn, and Ms. Johnson to discuss the design needs for my project. With Ms. Johnson’s guidance, Nick will be creating the logo design and packaging design for my company.
During the meeting, I presented my design brief, as well as discussed some specific details regarding the process. I hope to finish the logo design process within the next couple weeks and then shift focus to the packaging design. While I am accustomed to the logo design process from my previous businesses, the package design process will be a new learning experience. Since many factors such as label size, material, background, legal standards, and nutrition labels affect the overall design, there will be a lot of research required to make sure the packaging meets the needs of the product. All in all, I am super excited to get started on this process and very happy to have Nick handling the design! As we near the end of Winter Break, I have accomplished both goals I set out to: naming the company and figuring out how to best proceed with designing my brand identity. Though there is a slight chance the name could end up changing, I have decided on the name Performance Backed for the supplement company. This naming process was difficult because nearly every name I (or those I asked) could think of was already trademarked or had a domain in use. To reserve this name, I purchased the domain (peformancebacked.com) from Google Domains, as well as secured the social media handle @PerformanceBacked on the major social media platforms. In regards to the visual brand identity, I created a detailed design brief for the logo design, which, I hope to begin work on in January.
On 12/29, I met with Mr. Fennell to discuss how I can best proceed with business plan creation and financial forecasting for the investment pitch. Additionally, I drafted my Midterm Fellows Update presentation for next month. Reflecting on my work on my project this year, I am very excited at all of the progress I have made and am very excited to continue working on it in 2022! I spent the last couple weeks ironing out details of how my product would be manufactured if it was a real company. After speaking with a representative from a manufacturing company again, we settled on making the product a tablet with a 3 tablet serving size. I was given a quote for the finished product at 4200 units of 20 servings, and 2800 units of 30 servings. I am still waiting on the quote from the smaller manufacturer that should give me a better idea of how much it would realistically cost to produce on a first run. Though I originally planned on making the product a capsule delivery, the bulk densities of the ingredients in my formula were too high to keep the serving size at under 4 capsules––it would have been closer to 6 or 7.
During this time, I also met with Mr. Fennell from the business office to discuss financial planning and business models, and I plan on talking more with him in the near future. In regards to Winter break, I met with Dr. Martin to create my goals for the time off. We decided on two main goals: creating a name for the brand & figuring out how I could best approach graphic design. Aside from brainstorming possible names, the naming process will include an extensive trademark, domain, and social media search to make sure the name is available for use. It will also involve ensuring that the name is not too similar to other popular brands' names that it would be difficult to find my brand on the first page of a search engine. Lastly, I will reference the positioning strategies I developed to create name and brand identity cohesion. On the other hand, the graphic design process will entail researching and developing the best methods to ensure my product positioning and brand values come across well in my visual brand identity through things such as colors, shapes, and typography. I am looking forward to break and the opportunity to get even more stuff done! |