Kai Heller-Spencers Blog

 Idea Napkin No. 2 You.  Who you are. What your talents are. What your skills and experiences are. Also: what are your aspirations? Specifically regarding your business concept, how do you see this business (if you were to start it) playing a role in your life? My name is Kai Heller-Spencer, I am a junior at UF, majoring in finance. My personality type under Hollands code is conventional, realistic and enterprising. Which means I like being organized, use common sense but also take risks. When I have an idea I research it, find out everything about it; and once I am confident in my idea, I go for it. Starting off this business would be very time consuming, developing the app and marketing it to businesses. Once I got it up and running, I would do an alpha stage were the app would only run in my town. I would try and fix any major bugs before launching it in Fort Lauderdale and then in Miami. The app development and beta stage would take roughly two years. Basically perf...

18A – Create a Customer Avatar My app has two sources of revenue. Half of it is from businesses; the other part is through monetizing the apps through individuals. For this exercise I will create an avatar that describes the individual. In order to describe this avatar, I will explain a typical week of this individual. Its Monday morning, Dylan doesn’t have any class today but works at Jimmy Johns from 11 am till 6pm. After work he comes home and watches Netflix for a two hours. He then decides he’s hungry so he texts his buddies and they all cram in his Honda Civic and go to Chipotle. When they all get there, Dylan remembers his check hasn’t come in yet and he doesn’t have any money in his bank account. Fortunately, one of his friends has a lot of money and covers Dylan. It’s about 9 o’clock now and Dylan decides to go to the gym for about an hour.  After he finishes at the gym and has chugged his protein shake he goes to the library. Spending roughly an ...

Elevator Pitch No. 2  2. The feedback I received was more of product feedback, rather than personal feedback. The person liked my idea and thought it would be extremely useful. Going back over my first pitch I noticed a few things that I though should be corrected. The first was the rate at which I talked. I seemed to go fast in parts making it hard to understand. Another criticism was my lack of eye contact. I tried to fix that by looking more into the camera. It was a however a challenge due to the phone being lower then I was. A thing I should try and fix for the next pitch would have to be the movement. I seem to be moving my shoulders a lot, distracting to the viewer. 

15A – Figuring Out Buyer Behavior No. 2 In my first two interviews, the owners were mainly concerned with pricing. My first interview was with Lion & Eagle English pub. They thought it would be smart if the app did a bar of the day. Basically starting out, I should put all the bars into a simulated raffle. Whomever wins will have their bar name and promotion pop up immediately when the app opens. And when the app becomes more developed, setting a certain price allowing a bar to pay a higher fee but benefit from the additional exposure. I thought that was a genius idea and could bring in extra revenue. For my second interview I went to Warehouse Pub.   The manager was mainly concerned with pricing, he suggested not doing a flat fee but a partnership. He recommended that I set up a QR code system. Meaning, when a customer uses the app and they go into the bar and show this QR code then I will receive a percentage of the revenue from that customer. That way smaller bars don’t ...

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance What surprised you the most? When Elon Musk was in the third or fourth grade, he had already read all the books in the school library and the neighborhood library. He even tried to convince the librarian to order more books. Because she didn’t, he decided to read the Encyclopaedia Britanni. He said, “That was so helpful. You don’t know what you don’t know. You realize there are all these things out there.” What about the entrepreneur did you most admire? At the age of 28 he already sold his first business and made $22 million dollars. Most millionaires would have called it quits, not Elon. He invested most of that into his new venture, a startup that would become PayPal. When he sold that and made $180 million, he again put all of his money into three startups. He put $100 million into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla and $10 million in solar city. Essentially the fastest way to get rid of $180 millio...