Assignment 25 - What's Next?

Existing Market.

Step 1 –

What is next for my venture would be expanding my service from just shoes to other online clothing retail. There are some factors that make this difficult though, with shoes there are much fewer options to begin with, so it is possible to represent almost all options in the data. With something like shirts, there are just so many different shirts with no real standard to go off.

Step 2 –

Christopher, senior UF student, thought buying from manufacturers could be the next step to cut out the middleman, but also agreed that the idea of expanding to other clothes after being successful with shoes worked out made sense. He pointed out that there are other footwear related products that could also potentially be marketed through the application.

Steven, junior UF student, believed that the next step for a business like this is to be able to order newly released shoes and predict from the size and shape of the sole if it will fit, this way I wouldn’t have to wait for customers to buy the shoe before it could be entered in the application. He wondered if I were underestimating the number of people I would need to employ, he thought I might need to consider someone to handle finances and someone to handle human resources.

David, late 30’s casual long-distance runner, thought adapting to the user response would be an important next step after the app was created. He thought it might be helpful to hire someone to do user interface/ user experience rather than having only developers working on it. He thought my ideas of what customers could be too big of a project but does sound like the logical progression.

Step 3 –

I think that the path I came up with, expanding to other online clothing retail, does still seem like a good idea. It might be difficult though, as previously mentioned, to be as accurate with other less standardized clothing. From their advice, I will adapt my business concept to include a UI/UX specialist and consider hiring for finances and HR.

I think buying from manufacturers as Steven suggested could be a good move, and if I can get on good terms with manufacturers it could lead to me selling the product off to one of them. There would be a lot of sales I would be missing out on if I could not promote shoes that are yet to release. Also, I could expect larger commissions if I could sell from manufacturer to buyer.

New Market.

Step 1 –

My concept is currently business to customer, but I have considered making it a business to business product. I think it might be a better way to go about it in some ways, but a lot of the functionality would need to drastically change.

Step 2 –

In order for my product it to be sellable to a business I think I would need to focus less on the crowd sourced data idea and rather have the businesses enter information about their own shoes and how they fit, and potentially use that information with user input information about the dimensions of their feet to recommend shoes. It would exist more as an API connected to a database of sorts that will be shown as information on how a shoe might fit on the page when a customer is viewing a shoe that they are considering purchasing.

Step 3 –

This is difficult to find interviewees for because of how hard it is to contact someone who works in a relevant position, so I will just have some people who are acting in place of.

Steven, acting as a sales representative for an online shoe retailer, he thought the application oriented in this way could be a good way of reducing returns and increasing the sales through their site. He thought focusing on making it more of a product to businesses rather than it being a service offered to customers makes sense. Which would mean selling it as something where someone in the business would enter data that they have on all their shoes, and it would use our software to make good recommendations to customers.

David, acting as a sales representative for an online shoe retailer, he thought it might be an effective use of the data that they already keep on their shoes which they do not seem to use much. He thought it could be sold as a service to companies, where they would pay to be put on the application and they could enter their own information on the shoes that are listed.

What surprised me most is the idea of selling the application as a service to manufacturers. I have mostly considered making it either a service to customers or just making it a product for manufacturers. I think I correctly assumed that it would be more difficult to get information without the data coming from customers. I would have to rely on businesses inputting their own information.

I think the market of selling as a service to manufacturers is almost as attractive as my existing market. The main problem I have is that it would be difficult to get businesses to be interested if the application cannot be user tested without data from businesses. Because of this I think it might be a good idea to stick with my current market and maybe change markets after I begin to see some success.