I will not lie and say that there wasn’t a lot of confusion and uncertainty on my part while working on this project. During lectures, I felt like I understood the basic gist of different concepts – TAM SAM SOM, MVP, BMC, market segmentation, etc. But actually having to apply what I learned to Soup & Bread was very challenging. I’m very grateful to my teammates who, when we’d get stuck down a path trying to figure out what our TAM was for example, could pull us out of the weeds and center our group back on the overarching goals and framework.
I’m pretty impressed with how we were able to pivot so last minute to the Soup & Bread Express idea (Friday afternoon of week 5!) and make it work. Everybody was very flexible with discarding our previous plan and willing to go out for a second round of interviews to test our new hypothesis. Interviewing is something I would like to get better at, because sometimes people wouldn’t share enough, and sometimes they’d talk our ears off with some unrelated tangent.
It was great to work with our mentor Peter and I’m grateful for his involvement and support. He had warned us that the judges might ask for specific numbers, and he was right. It was definitely nerve racking to stand on that stage and be grilled on numbers we didn’t have. But I think our team answered gracefully, and maybe the judges weren’t keyed in on the focus of this class. It would’ve been helpful to learn more about how to crunch the numbers and calculate the amount of foot traffic we’d need (what the judges asked us) and just in general, what kind of numbers would investors/judges really want to see.
