Working on FurFuel has been a great experience so far. Coming into CS 177 I did not expect this was going to be the project I work on, but I am happy it is. It feels unique to anything I’ve worked on before.
I’ve loved conducting interviews of our target market in different places, like in our dorms or the Stanford Shopping Center where we’ve found the most success. We talked to pet owners of all kinds with different feeding and spending habits. I’ve also loved ideating with my team about different ways we could take the company. We’ve talked about International expansion to magical ice cubes. Ultimately, we landed on freeze dried dog food, a medium that takes into account our customer’s needs for convenience and affordability. Coming up with our pitch presentation was also fun because we were able to compile all of our findings and present our idea that we believe in for review.
The process of finding what direction to take our company was difficult. We initially had to come up with different ideas, without any interview data to back the ideas up. Once we talked to our customers it was easier to ideate. Another challenge we encountered was dealing with the huge competition in the dog food market with multiple companies doing the same things we are doing at FurFuel. It’s difficult to come up with something that hasn’t been done before, but also feasible and lucrative.
