For me, personally, working on this pitch deck was such an adventure. To start with, the company’s focus is not anything I am familiar with: The goal of social good, the big numbers, the central american indigenous culture… etc. So the experience of researching these things in itself was very out of my comfort zone. Additionally, I really did take this class as an intro class, so I came with almost no previous knowledge of anything discussed in it, and everything was new. For me, this meant that everything was a learning opportunity, the mistakes were bad but also taught me something not to do again. For my team, however, it felt a little like slowing them down, which I am almost apologetic about. While they have clearly been trying to be patient with me and explain as much as possible and review my work and give feedback on it, I should still acknowledge that they may or may not have gone faster without me. Again, personally, I learned a LOT about profit, strategies, marketing etc etc so I am so fulfilled and happy about this project.
I am also grateful for our mentor Rekha who took our project very seriously and genuinely tried to be helpful. Most of her comments can be summarized in that we should have introduced our company better in the slides, especially to be a little more specific about our customers. Additionally, she prompted us to think more thoroughly about our expansion method, instead of directly jumping into the web platform idea. After conversation, we decided that making our website was not going to take a .ot from us as we already have a shipping strategy installed we have been using already, but we also decided to expand our customers of interest by focusing on specific products and targeting customers interested in those products instead of just people interested in indigenous crafts.
Overall, this has been a valuable and exciting learning experience for me.
