Pitching
Party
Last Friday,
CS3216 had a pitching party. Students and alumni would pitch ideas to the class
with the hope that some people would want to work on it. Unfortunately for me,
I was the first to go and get slaughtered lots of feedback.
The grand idea:
SplinkIt is
an online market place that connects event organizers and brands through campus
event sponsorship.
The
objective of SplinkIt is to help organizers with the painful fund raising
process and at the same time provide brands with an easy channel to reach
youths.
The
comments and questions asked were pretty good and fortunately it was not the
first time someone posts the same questions.
As a multi
sided platform, our team have the confidence that we could easily get the
students on board(free money, why not right?) and the debate of the session
lies predominantly on would the companies buy into this?
Based on
what we found, we believe the answer is yes. Brands have an insane appetite to
advertise themselves all the time (I am sure everybody knows of a red bottle of
sugared water). They do it for awareness, launching of something new or just
simply branding. The challenge for us is how to make our service so valuable
that they would consider advertising at events (through us) vs TV, print,
radio, facebook, google and other avenues. A fact that consoles us at this
point is that we are not trying to reinvent the wheel here. Brands sponsor all
the time, just look at many of the events held in NUS and you will see many
logos on flyers and banners. What we do need is to understand the motivations
behind such acts and how we can make provide more value to them.
We do not
have the answer to this during pitch night and we are yet to have it now. But
we are taking steps to validate this assumption by speaking to brands and their
marketers in the coming weeks.
Assignment
3
This
assignment is proving to be way harder than it should be. Up till now, we are
still unsure of what really matters to the user. The danger of creating
something so simple and with so many competitors is that it is easy to be
missed without a compelling value proposition. I guess this also makes it more
fun, we either win big and become the sole clear winner or fall into the abyss terribly here.
Given there
is just 2 days left, I foresee we will be scrambling these 2 days. All braced
for that!
Unfortunately for me, I was the first to go and get slaughtered lots of feedback.
ReplyDeleteLook on the bright side. You got a lot more air time and attention that the rest. In any case, if you want to succeed, you've got to learn to grow a thick skin and to keep at it even when obstacles come your way.
You still need to address the fundamental problem of companies and students bypassing you. As pointed out students will pad their budgets by 15%, and companies also know this and know that they will end up paying 15% more if they used your portal.
ReplyDeleteOne way might be for you to source for the sponsorships, and then open the portal to students to pitch their ideas, and you serve as matchmakers. By removing the transparency it helps to prevent students going directly to the companies. It's a heck of a lot more work for you though.
Once students make their contacts within a company they will go directly, so this is sort of like a tuition centre model where the fee is collected only for the first transaction.
ReplyDeleteI don't think any company will allow you to escrow the funds and disburse it to the students yourself, so I don't see any way out of this. :p
Hey Jay!
ReplyDeleteCheck out www.youthsays.com. They are a very very successful website in Malaysia where students do surveys for these big brands in return for money, like RM0.50 per survey something like that. LOTS AND LOTS of big brands paid this platform and it became one of the top youth platforms in Malaysia today for brands to reach out to youths. I don't know if they have the survey thing anymore, but they held a youth conference/event sometime back where over 30K youths attended.
Now they've expanded to other countries in Asia. You can read the Wikipedia page on them too.
You should check it out and see what you can learn from them. Your idea definitely has merit if executed right!
Another site you would want to check out along the same lines is GushCloud. http://gushcloud.com/
Jiayou! :D