Reflection – Furfuel

Creating the pitch for furfuel was a huge learning experience. While I’ve created and pitched products before in classes like CS 147 and 247, I have never been involved in the business end of things. I felt like I was absorbing a lot of new information and new practices, and it was honestly pretty difficult for me sometimes. However, even in light of this, it was a really nice experience to go from ideation, to needfinding, to eventually coming up with our product and reasoning through all the details. I was really grateful of the team members I had and I really admired all the skills they each brought to the table and the friendly environment that we all helped to cultivate. I loved that my team was enthusiastic aboout the company/idea and I especially appreciated how we were all very thoughtful and detail oriented when it came to the product. All the features of our freeze-dried dog food product came directly from interviews, competitive data, and the goals and specifications of our assigned company furfuel. It was interesting to note the issues that existed for us as an established company which were very different from a startup- I think initially we wanted to go the startup route of finding a brand new service and eventually realized how oversaturated the market was, and that we could instead leverage our existing capital/customer base as an established brand to elevate our reach.

The issue of oversaturation in our market was a pretty huge roadblock for us and caused us to stall on what our final pitch should be for a really long time. In the future, I would appreciate more hands on assistance with our ideas, as our mentor was only abel to give us feedback after our initial pitch presentation was already submitted. It would also be helpful in my eyes, as Dilan suggested, to let different groups interact with each others projects earlier on in order to help spot ideas and potential shortcomings. I also don’t really appreciate having four assignments due this week, because it makes it difficult to focus fully on this project. All in all I’m grateful for the experience and for my team !