Guy Kawasaki had a very memorable talk on the art of the start and gave information on thing we could truly integrate into our food products. First, Kawasaki stressed the importance of making meaning with whatever product we create. Anything truly worth doing should increase the quality of life, right a wrong, or prevent the end of something good. While the goal of our project was kind of decided for us, it’s something we have considered in every decision we have made. Our goal is to create is to provide a food that treats micronutrient deficiencies and makes a change in the malnourished children, the product will also provide job opportunities for women in production and distribution. The success of our food would lead to the high nutrition levels in children in Sierra Leone which contribute to a better immune system, a lower chance of catching diseases, and lower mortality. Next, Kawasaki explained that everyone working on a project should be “infected” with your product. His word choice really resonated with me, and it’s what I remember most from his talk. Hopefully, the people we work with in Sierra Leone will really like our product and help us make decisions for its success. If we have people working on our product that really love it and think it can succeed, it will. Third, Kawasaki’s approach to making a business model was very similar to what we discussed last week in class. His philosophy in creating the business model was to think ‘how do I get my money out of my customers’ pockets?’ We are not working on this project to make money, but we can use this thinking when trying to get customers to switch to our bouillon cube from the Maggi cube. Then, after explaining business models, Kawasaki explained his idea of weaving a MAT. MAT represents weaving through the milestones, assumptions, and tasks of a design. In the past few weeks, we have really thought about the assumptions we have about our customer, and while these are things that we cannot completely confirm before fieldwork, these assumptions have been leading the direction of our product since the beginning. For example, we are assuming that our customer, like many people in Sierra Leone is living on less than $1 per day, so our product needs to be extremely cheap to produce. Lastly, Kawasaki gave advice on pitch presentations that I found interesting. He believes that a successful pitch should have 10 slides, last 20 minutes, and have no smaller than 30 point font. We cannot exactly translate this to our final presentation, but if we truly know our material and focus on getting the point across, we can see the same results that Kawasaki was emphasizing. We can also use this format when we (hopefully) present at conferences or for other groups.

Business Model Canvas