Andres' Entrepreneurship Blog

What makes me special: - A vision to transform the venture from what it currently is, a simple website where we sell pet products from other companies manufactured in china at a lower price, and make it a brand. - We are original and specific, not a lot of other e-commerce sites are offering our exact niche - The commitment we have to grow this venture from what it is now to what it is now to what we want it to become - The social capital we have created by attending pet accesories conventions, specifically the Global Pet Expo which was held in Orlando on march 21-23 - The financial capital we have amassed for the sole purpose of commiting to the venture - All of the supply we already possess - The low prices which is our main differentiation from the competition - The (slow) speed of our deliveries, which allow us to offer the prices we offer - Our human capital, which is a great group of hard working people that want to take this venture to the next level - Our inside knowl...

 I am Andres Riera, my talents are persuation and getting what I want, my new idea is a dropshipping business of pet supplies and accesories, stuffvisor.com  but my aspirations are for the website to become a brand. I am currently offering pet supplies with a lower price compared to the rest of the market, but with slower shipping, the average shipping time is 10-12 days. I am offering it to customers in the US, since it currently online only, my main demopraphic are millenial pet owners, who are the generation most involved in the internet. My customers care because of the lower cost, If the longer shipping time is not a problem, meaning it is not an urgent product like food and medicines, so it is worth waiting for because of the money savings. Firstly, I am a pet owner, so I am a consumer, I know the market, the prices. Also, personally I think I understand the value of time and money and its balance.

The general theme or argument of the book is divided in three aspects, the first two are in the title of the book, which are innovation and entrepreneurship, and the third is finding smart entrepreneurial practices, which are very important to bring the ideas to life. The book is very linked to what we have been learning this semester in ENT3003, one of the aspects that show similarity between the both is teaching everyone that entrepreneurship is not only the big tech companies that are always in the news, instead every small businessman can be an entrepreneur, which is what we have been taught in this class from the beginning. An excercise I would make from this book is making a list of differences of what entrepreneurship is and is not. My biggest surprise, or 'aha' moment from the book was when the author mentioned that entrepreneurship is not a quality that only some people have, it is not something that you are born with, but instead are a number of actions and behavio...

After interviewing three different candidates from the first assignment on figuring out buyer behavior, I figured out how they evaluate alternatives to the products offered. The first subect simply chooses the cheapest option, price matters most. But for the others it is not so much about money but instead about value, what gets you the most for your money, so for this they use online reviews, especially from Youtube. Other factors that also affect the choice in alternatives are design, there must be a balance between form and function. Nowadays the main way people make this purchase is online, since it is always available and reviews are offered right on the same website. Most customers are more likely to use cash, there is very little need to finance a product like this. When thinking back on the rightness of the purchase, what matters most is if they got value for their money, they ask themselves if it is useful for what they bought it for, do they use is a lot?

Other than tenacity, which is of course very necessary to complete this class, I believe that the main behaviors that I have developed in order to keep up with the requirements of this course are time management and perseverance. I used to leave every assignment for the last minute, and because of this, sometimes I could not complete them, so by managing my time I started doing a lot better in the class. There was a time I felt like giving up but did not, but is waas not during this class, it was last semester when I was applying to UF and my grades were not so good so I did not think that I would get accepted, but instead of giving up, I worked harder and received the grades I needed to get accepted. The three tips I would give to next semester's students would be to ALWAYS check the calendar for the assignments. When you have an idea, work very hard on it no matter what. And finally if you fail once, keep trying, failure is part of the experience

GrindingIt Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc What surprised me the most, and also what I most admire about him is the fact that he started with McDonald's when he has 52 years old. What I admire the least, which is not really even a negative thing is that he was already a successful entrepreneur, he was not struggling before McDonald's, and also his personality was very egocentric. When Kroc found adversities he kept on going despite everything else. The competencies that I noticed about Kroc was his natural ability as a salesman, he was one of those people that could sell you everything, and also his perseverance. Something about the reading that confused me was the structure of the first two chapters, the first one talks about the business structure, and in the second chapters is more about his life, which confused me at first. The first question that I would ask him is why go to the first McDonald's in California and talk to the owners to become part ...

To perform the three interviews, I chose three UF students that use the web services very differently, but fall in the same unmet need, which is the unified UF student website. After interviewing the first student for several minutes, the unmet need comes when he wants to purchase Gator tickets, and he spends some time figuring out in which of the multiple websites he needs to access to make the purchase, which is the Gator1central. The second student's problem begin when he wants to add classes for his next semester, and so he needs to nagivate through all of the sites to find out where to perform this task. The third and last student want to pay his tuition and does not know where to do this, this is when and where his unmet need begins. When the students become aware of their unmet need, the first thing they do to figure out their problem is ask other students, as every student has to go through the same websites, the issue in this situation is that most students that still ...

In the past exercises, i found a problem that has very recurring in my life as a UF student, which was the issue of the online services offered by the university, which are hosted in multiple websites, this becomes a problem for students, beacuse they have to be constantly looking for the exact service they need in all of the websites, as well as the University, because of the increasing cost of server maintenance as well as IT salaries. The solution for this problem would be to develop one website where you can find all of the information and services offered by the university, it would be easily accesible from the UF homepage ( http://www.ufl.edu /) and be clear enough so that it is not a hassle to use. One.uf is the website which offers the most services, so we use this as a template, since canvas is a service separate from the university there would be an easy to find link, and the services from gator 1 and myUF would be added to the website

Regulatory changes - Net Neutrality Bill: On December 14, 2017, the FCC's Republican majority apporved Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to gut the Net Neurality protections. I found this opportunity when learning about this change on the news about six months ago, when there was a large campaign on the internet to stop this bill. This information suggests that an opportunity might exist because it leaves an opening to new ISPs (Intermet Service Provider) that can offer lower prices and better deals than the ones that currently exist have. The prototypical customer for this opportunity is any person in the United States with internet access that is not willing to pay more for what they currently have with their ISP. This opportunity is probably relatively hard to exploit because of the competition; the big ISPs like Comcast are extremely anti-consumer and will try to prevent new companies from entering the market. I saw this because I consider myself a prototypical customer of this ...

When writing my bug list, I discovered that the thing that bugged me the most was also an opportunity that I believe affects me and every other UF student, as well as the university itself. The issue is the web services that the university offers, for example, there is ONE.UF, which offers services like the degree audit, registering for classes and viewing the class schedule; then there is Canvas, which is the eLearning tool for most classes, and has a calendar with all of the assignments; the Gator Cloud's primary function is the student email, but it also has a calendar, which is not synched to the one on canvas, this is annoying because having two calendars can be confusing ans simply complicates things; there is also myUFL, which handles the tuition payment and other finances, as well as other services such as buying gator tickets. This is a problem for both the student and the university. For the student it is time consuming, and can complicate things when trying to find a spe...

Hospice is shutting down in Key West, and there's a problem with the alternative Article link:  http://bit.ly/2GdrrRe The only hospice of the Key West area is closing its doors due to financial complications, which was made even worse by hurricane Irma, the shutdown will leave 10 people without their full-time job and 12 without their part-time job. According to the article, hospice is " a form of palliative care where patients with life-limiting illness are treated for their symptoms but they are not under a treatment meant to cure them".  This is a big problem for the region because the only other hospice provider is two hours away by car, 91 miles away. The main people affected by this are the elders under hospice care, who will probaly have to relocate. Why should everyone have a lawyer except abused and neglected kids? Article link:  http://bit.ly/2BqtNZr The article talks about children in Florida that are victims of abuse, abandonment and neglect; and t...

The entrepreurship story that has had the most influence in my life has been the store that my mom opened. She had been working for a telecomunications company in Caracas, Venezuela for almost 8 years, but she always had a talent to sell, so on 2008 she quit her job and decided to open up a store that sold boutique gifts, such as handmade bags by tribes in the amazon, expensive jewlery, picture frames of all kinds, leather goods for men and such. The year between her quitting and opening the store was amazing, I went with her to the places she bought the merchandise, working with the graphic designer for the logo and picking every detail for the store. At first things started good but she was not making as much money as her last job, but overtime the store became a huge success.

I live here in Gainesville on 20th ave, and every morning I have to take the line 20 of the RTS bus, which is one of the busiest lines in Gainesville, but even at peak times, there are only 4 busses working, so more than once the bus has arrived and i could not get in because it has full. I believe this happens because the busses are free for students, which is most of Gainesville's population, so there is not enough money to get more busses When doing transactions through separate banks, it always takes 3 business days to complete, which I find complete. I believe this is because banks need to make sure that they are legal transactions and this is a long process In my apartment residence called Canopy Apartments, they take way too long to complete service requests in the apartments such as changing a lightbulb, this probably happens because of the large number of apartments that they have to attend The fact that in order to watch every TV show I want to watch through streamin...