"Doubt can only be removed by action" - Goethe

We continue our journey in this process of value creation and in the past week have had a lot of success. Dan going to Spaghettifest this past week brought in the sale of 6 "Lighterlungs" (official name to be determined) and even more amazing than that is the publicity he brought for our product in The Breeze. Excerpt from the article in The Breeze below:

With the application process for on-campus approval still in the works we have decided to look into other ventures as well to tag onto the form with the "Ligterlung" to get it approved all at once. The best idea we have at the moment would be an ink refill and recycling service. We would advertise, probably on facebook, the creation of this and tell people to bring in their ink cartridges at different times and places that we post online. We would buy a kit, like the ink station below, and refill ink catridges wherever we set up.
 
We were thinking about also telling people to bring in old cartridges as well, ones that they don't want to refill from old printers. We were going to try to set up something with a store, such as staples, and bring in old cartridges to recycle for a set amount of money per cartridge. That way we have the option of filling up your ink cartridge and saving you time/money, or recycling your old cartridge and helping save the Earth while making a bit of money.

Hopefully the coupling of these two ventures will be a success and will yield profits much higher than the requirement.

Until next time,

Team Kylotos

A Product is Born!

As team Kylotos continued to elaborate on our pains that we have identified, we decided that we could fix the pain of losing your lighter. We began brainstorming ideas and it didn't take long to come up with the simple idea to attach a lighter to something much more important i.e. car keys via a key ring. So we worked on several generations of prototypes and finally designed one that was made out of tin with tape wrapped around it that holds the lighter tightly, but can be replaced. This allows the customer to either take the lighter out of the sleeve and refill it with fluid, or replace the lighter entirely. The process has been refined and as opposed to 15 minutes to make the first "sh--s weak" edition, we can now make a high class one in 4 minutes.

The idea was generally well liked among both smokers and non-smokers, but two negative issues continued to come up. The vast majority of the time it was brought up by non-smokers who weren't as familar with the problem of lighter loss. The first problem is the idea that a smoker will just start losing their entire key-chain and be totally screwed. Dan is the only smoker in the group (and entire class for that matter) and his outlook on it was that he could lose a lighter anytime. Dan could lose it under the seat of a car, in a couch, giving it to someone to light a cigarette, or wherever. But his keys, he holds onto like they are Midas' gold.

The second question or problem that both smokers and non-smokers comment on is that the product already exists somewhere because it's so simple. It doesn't matter that this product might exist somewhere, because it doesn't exist at the 7/11 down the street or the HESS next to it. It also doesn't exist at B&B tobacco, any Exxon in Harrisonburg, Liberty, Food Lion, and yes my friends, even Wal-Mart. But it doesn't stop there, it also doesn't exist in anyone's pocket at JMU or Blue Ridge unless we made it and gave it to you.

In addition to that little rant, there's this link too, after searching Bic lighter key-chain in Google images search, this "same product idea" was the first response and his is rather ghetto compared to Kylotos.
http://www.zombiehunters.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=54819

Off to sell at Spaghetti-fest in WV this weekend.

Sincerely,

Team Kylotos

The Beginning

This begins our MGT 372 blog and the online record of Team Kylotos' endeavors. Kylotos consists of Dan Auth, Cody Connors, and Michael Gentilini who are on the quest to entrepreneurial success and a target profit of $200 for the semester. After some in-class group exercises and our first official team meeting earlier this week we are exploring different ideas to address consumer pains.

After the first meeting we came up with the top three pains of losing your lighter, there being No JMU VT shirt yet, and having scratched CDs/DVDs. We even designed a shirt on Customink.com:

A couple days after our meeting we quickly began to realize that there were already multiple JMU VT shirts being made and probably will not look into that venture further. After the  Points of Pain Idea Examination Fair exercise in class, we got some interest for the CD/DVD scratch repair from Prof. Wales and are going to explore this option as well as many others further.


Until next time.

Kindest Regards,
Team Kylotos