NYX Resistance

In reflection of my entire experience and what I took away from this course overall it was an interesting journey. The whole blogging concept took me a little bit to get used to, but after a while I got the hang of it and I actually rather enjoy it. There were definitely times throughout the semester that I felt a little stretched or I was a little uncertain what to do; however, I learned that pretty much all of the information we need is already at our fingertips we just need to go out there and look at what others have done (the internet is a great tool for this).

As for our final pitch, I felt it went pretty good, being the competitive person I am, it's never fun to come in second place, but at the end of the day Mido did a great job and thus I recognize it is important to give credit where credit is due. In hindsight, I think the area that we probably could further develop in our pitch is making the problem a little bit more convincing (it was somewhat compelling). The great thing about pitching in front of judges in this particular environment is that it provides a safe environment where we can all learn from our mistakes and improve.

Lastly, I would like to say thanks to Evan for giving his time to teach and mentor this class, it is great to learn from an individual with so much experience and knowledge. I found every class I took away a piece of knowledge that I didn't know before and for that I am very grateful. Also on behalf of the entire class thanks for providing a relaxed and fun learning environment.

Last of all, I would like to say thank you to all of my teammates, you guys are amazing and I look forward to working with you in the next class. Until next semester, thank you all for providing your input on our venture and for making this class such an enjoyable experience.

Cheers

This week has been a busy one with respect to getting our final pitch ready, building our venture package, and working through our supply chain. We decided to make two different supply chain charts with different strategies.

In order to keep our manufacturing costs manageable in our first year while we create demand, we felt that it would be best to manufacture locally here in Calgary. This will enable us to work and fulfill orders on a JIT basis and cut holding costs. Additionally, we discovered that if we were to manufacture across seas, usually they require large orders of which in our initial faze we would like to keep overhead costs as low as possible.

Upon discussion with our board of advisers, we chose to move our manufacturing overseas in our second year. Once our demand creation plan has run its course in the first year, we will expect greater demand for our product and for this reason, it wouldn't make any sense to continue manufacturing locally when we can save substantially on the cost for each shirt by producing overseas.

I actually rather enjoyed working on the supply chain for this particular venture. I've taken a class in supply chain prior to the class; however, I found that working out the logistics and whatnot for your own business is much more interesting than being taught from a text book. After we looked at our financials again through a supply chain lens, it was rather interesting to see the impact that this process had on our business and the cost structure.

The pitch workshop conducted in class I believe was probably one of the best if not the best I've heard. The framework that was presented was very simple yet effective. When writing a pitch, I've always found the introduction to be the hardest part because if you are unable to capture the audience in the first minute of your presentation, you've lost them for the entire pitch. The "ah ha!" introduction is a great way to provide the audience with a background as to how you came up with the idea and can really sell the investor on your dedication to pursue and persist with the venture given difficult times.

Additionally, the exercise of putting your business concept into a twitter summery was challenging; however, it made it easier to communicate when pitching. The format "We created ______that does _______ which solves ______ for _______." Is a simplistic way for any business to describe what they do, who it's for, and the problem it is solving.

Another interesting piece of information that I took away from the workshop was the concept of knowing and researching your audience. The topic of pitching to Canadians differently than Americans I found to be rather interesting and something I will keep in mind for the future.

Overall, the 10 step process that was shared really simplified pitching for me. I often would make writing a pitch a really big deal and it was definitely not one of my favorite things to do. With this framework, it is easy to write a great pitch and have the confidence that it will generate a positive response.

This week was our final advisory meeting. It was not the most productive but it was very good to see we were on the right track. The advisors showed us that we are on the right track with our supply chain. We have now developed two different supply chains, one for year one when we will be manufacturing in Canada and then for year two and beyond we will be manufacturing over seas. By manufacturing overseas we must identify the risk and rewards associated. Some of the risks include: lack of quality control from one of the founders, risk of having the designs stolen, uncertainty with the manufactures as well as decreased ability to give feedback and make adaptions to the product. But it could end up being significantly cheaper and it is easier have mass production. By keeping production in-house for the first year we will be able to get rid of any of the "kinks" or issues that will arise. That way by the time we send the design over seas it will be clean and not need any adaptions.

This week was very busy with other classes as well as having some personal health issues, which put me very behind. I got very confused by some of the financials, they were more extensive then I felt I had the ability to finish. I was also un-sure of what was required because the spreadsheet from the University of Colorado is very extensive.

I was so inspired and excited about our class with Stephen Kenny today that I decided to immediately blog about it. First of all, lectures conducted by Stephen are always interesting. Stephen has a real way of capturing the attention of the room as well as presenting concepts in a way that is simplistic and interesting.

The FCF (Free Cash Flow) spread sheet is a tool that I know will get lots of use well beyond this class. Being able to tinker with our companies evaluation and to see the potential reward down the road is something that motivates us all to work a little bit harder.

Additionally, the concept of risk and putting some of your own skin in the game was an interesting discussion. I found the story Stephen told about the young individual who drove his $80,000 BMW to a pitch and he only had put up $15,000 of his own money into the venture was a very interesting story. It really showed me the importance of showing your level of commitment to your potential investors. I think it was really valuable to hear from an experienced VC as to what they look for in a business and how to go about presenting your business in a way that is attractive to such an individual. 

Finally, I found today's class helped me get a more clear picture of how we could go about funding this particular venture and how we can manage our cash flow through each of these various stages.

This week we had an advisory meeting. In this meeting we wanted to cover electronic design of the prototype as well as webpage development. Jonathan has expertise in both categories so we decided that it would make sense to include his expertise in the advisory meeting and focus hard on technology content. For these reasons Jonathan was our only advisor at the advisory meeting this week.

As the class continues our roles as members of the NYX team become more specialized. Personally I will be responsible for an upgraded prototype design in the coming weeks. I will be addressing issues like weight, cost, fabrics and the function ability of these changes. Additionally I will be creating a written document arguing the grading structure of the NYX prototype overall.

This week Barb and I worked on the prototype together. It was a lot of work and I could not have done it without her.

Our ghetto mash up strategy was a good decision for our prototype development. I learned a lot about the design and requirements of the shirt by building it. There is a lot of redesign to do for the next and final prototype.

One of the first issues of the shirt is its weight. We needed several layers of fabric to ensure the tension would be enough to create strong resistance. We did create resistance but also a heavy shirt. The layers will also deter from any moisture wicking properties that we need to stay competitive in the athletic clothing market. We need to find a material or design that will create resistance while still staying breathable and light. Ian and I have not had a chance to meet up with Freddie’s connection but hopefully this connection will have feedback and suggestions for the fabric we need.

In our next meeting NYX will decide on how much time and money we are going to invest into our last prototype in order to help lay guidelines for Barb and I to create the final prototype around.

This week Thursday we had our third Board of Advisors meeting. At this particular meeting we really focused on discussing future possibilities regarding the website and Casey presented the latest update on the prototype. To concluded the meeting, as a team we took a fairly in depth internal and external look at NYX by conducting a SWOT analysis.

Conducting our SWOT analysis really allowed our team to step back and get a picture of where our business model excels and where we could potentially make changes to limit our weaknesses and threats. Sometime in the near future (likely this coming Friday) as a team we will revisit out BMC and make some new adjustments based on a lot of the information we've been working on in the last month. Probably one of the areas that we may need to address is how we can figure out ways to access multiple revenue streams.

Additionally we've begun working on the financials for our company with some of the assumptions. This upcoming week will be sure to be a busy one with all that's going on. Nonetheless, we are all excited to keep things rolling and keep up the momentum gained over the past two weeks.

This week was a huge learning curve. Our team got ambitious and registered our very own domain @ www.nyxresistance.com. Given that none of our team members are well versed in coding, we had a bit of an interesting time figuring things out. Fortunately one of our Board of Advisors (Jonathan) who has a history in coding, webdesign, and graphic design was kind enough to work with us on getting some of the basics put together. We still have a long way to go to get our website up to where we would like it to be; however, at the moment we have other pressing issues that require our time and attention as well. For example, I would really like to add a video to our landing page and get our social media channels connected to get consumers engaged. After reviewing some of our competitors websites we definitely made notes on what they've done well and areas we feel their site is lacking. We look to build upon what our competitors are doing well and make adjustments accordingly.  

Additionally this week while some of us were busy working on the website, Casey and Barb were making some great progress on our prototype. The initial mockup that Casey and Barb came up with was surprisingly good and from what we can tell looks to be fairly functional. The real test will be in the up coming weeks when Ian will begin doing our initial testing under his hockey equipment.

Overall week seven was another step in the right direction. Our team has really started to gel and we've managed to utilize our advisors in various roles to keep them engaged and push us to make things happen.

SWOT Analysis

This week we had our third adviser meeting. We really wanted to focus on the development of the website, and our SWOT analysis. We tackled this really well together and spent a couple hours thoroughly going over each question. This is a great team and certainly gets into action when the time calls for it.

Been working on our individual pitches the past few days. It will be interested to see what each person comes up with on the Nyx team, what route they take, and how they present it. From what I have seen so far through all our group meetings, I can see that everyone sees Nyx a little differently. With the combination of all our pitches, I can see this as a great final pitch, taking bits and pieces from each pitch.

This week will have to be very productive. Our advisory board meetings are a week behind, because we had some communication issues, so this means we are having a meeting this Thursday, November 8. This is our reading day so we are having it off campus, and with only 2 of our advisors as I mentioned in my last post.

This week we had the opportunity to see the prototype that Barb and Casey developed. They did an amazing job! It looks really good and feels like it has a lot of resistance. Ian is going to play a game of hockey in it, and report back on how it felt, if there was increased resistance or more sore then normal.

We also moved forward with the development of our website by purchasing the IP address www.nyxresistance.com from GoDaddy.com for a year. This was an inexpensive purchase that we thought would help increase both our personal investment in the venture as well as showing dedication to the class. Matt is the most apt at developing websites and most computer things. We have also been able to rely on Jon (advisory board member) to help us with any issues that arise. He has experience developing website, blogs and marketing campaigns.

We have also decided to have a very specific board meeting this coming week. We have had little development within the last two weeks, and we need to focus website and marketing development. So we are going to work specifically with Jon and Erik to develop various aspects of Nyx.

The progress we made with NYX this week I felt was rather good. I really enjoy working with this particular team - we all seem to get a long and have fun while simultaneously accomplishing our work in a timely fashion.

We conducted our second board meeting this past Thursday with all of our board members in attendance. I would first like to say that Casey did a fabulous job of organizing and hosting the meeting. In our very first board of advisers meeting we made some good progress with respect to developing the prototype; however, several of our advisers left our first meeting unclear as to exactly what our short-term and long-term objectives were.

In our second meeting we really made an effort to get our board members connected by giving a quick tutorial on Blogger (that way they can comment and stay up-to-date with how things are progressing). Additionally we clarified some of our objectives and what we expected from our board of advisors. Overall it was a great getting everyone on the same page moving towards our goal of getting our first prototype made.

In addition to having a productive week with our advisory board, we also made some great headway with our prototype (check out the pictures here). It's been a slow process, but with the help of Erin and Barb (one of our advisors), we have started to experiment with our first "Ghetto Mash-up". Casey has been doing a marvelous job of organizing and putting together our prototype.

Finally, as a team we had our weekly meeting on Friday and managed to accomplish our Key Strategic Resources, our Key Partners, and our key tasks that need to be accomplished over the next six months. Overall we had a highly productive week. Hopefully the momentum we made this week will carry into the next week.

This week we worked on our key resources and partnerships. It became apparent that there are stages of development throughout NYX’s start-up phase that will need different partners. We decided to take a current and future approach to help us focus on what is important now.

This week I will be meeting with Barb to further design and create a minimally working prototype. This prototype will target the muscles we are focusing on and will be a great stepping stone for further development of the prototype. Although this prototype will be basic it will be important in the development of NYX and our testing and learning process and we move into the minimally working prototype stage.

This week we met with the advisory board. The meeting went well and thank you to our advisors for your support.

Next week Ian and I are looking to meet with a connection that our advisor Freddie has suggested. This individual has experience in the athletic fabrics industry and we are hoping to get some feedback for our prototype. This will hopefully also help to develop a realistic cost plan in the future.

I will be facilitating the meeting next week so this week I am preparing to address the advisors. I will be covering what we have done, where we are going and outlining in what ways we would like the advisors to help the NYX team. This includes a description of the blog, how they are to use the blog and an outline of NYX’s expectations.

I am beginning to build the prototype and am still currently in the design process. Ian will be our model and initial customer for the shirt. I will be measuring him for fit and noting the muscles we are targeting. I will use this information to create a hand drawn sketch to build upon. We are currently exploring our options for a computer designed prototype. We would use a computer based prototype to help explain our product to individuals who cannot see the physical prototype.

Working on the development of the Prototype.

Freddy from our advisory board has helped us out hugely with this. Whether its from finding a flat seemer to sew our product together or material we will need to use. He has lots of expertise in this area. This will help us out a lot as we put together our final costs of the shirt.

This week has been much more productive then last. We had our second Advisory meeting, a week later then we were supposed to but we felt like we needed that time to get organized and make greater strides with our prototype. The meeting was very productive, especially to make it more explicit of what we want from them. It was also interesting to see the dynamic of the different advisory board members grow and to see some of the become more confident. Although no issues arouse I feel like we are starting to move past the storming phase of a team development on to a norming phase.

The greatest thing I got out of the meeting is very clearly determining our objectives and set very explicit rules of what is real and what is hypothetical. This point was brought by Jim. Jim has a lot of hands on experience with starting businesses and was having a hard time determining what was real and what was not. He felt if this was a real venture the first issue we would have to address would be financing. Although this is not how we will be facing this project it is a very important thing to be aware of when I do start my own business.