30A – Final Reflection

1) While reviewing all of the posts I've created for this class, the most impactful experience I had was finalizing my Idea Napkin No.1 because it was my first actual exercise that required me to sell who I was, what opportunity my company was fulfilling, and why my solution was the most effective. This assignment captured the main elements of brainstorming any type of of start-up business and it helped challenge me in organizing my thoughts and what I intended the service to do. One experience that I know I will remember years later was writing and filming my first elevator pitch, which happened to be my first official elevator pitch ever! Playing back and hearing how well the script flowed and how enthusiastic my speech was really brought me to a new level of happiness. That exercise helped me truly discover the path of business I'm most interested in, being a click-and-mortar type business. My most joyous experience was also the one I'm most of proud of completing in this class and that was finishing my first venture concept. After I completed and went through my finalized venture concept, I realized how much work had been put it and how accomplished I felt when reviewing the final product. I really enjoyed watching all of the work I complete this semester fall in line and ultimately help me create a complete, in-depth summary of my service, BeyondKash. 

2) As the end of the semester approaches, I definitely saw myself develop an entrepreneurial mindset and realized my interest in learning about the entrepreneurial process. After actually learning the steps and knowledge behind creating a product or service, I discovered that I was really interested in learning more and going above and beyond with each assignment. I truly wanted to learn how to do everything correctly, and in the end I saw myself grow and change as a person and into a businessman, who now looks at everything in different perspectives. I hope that I can use the skills obtained in this class and build upon them to ultimately fulfill an open opportunity that I believe in and  have a solution for.

3) One recommendation that I would make to future students about to embark of this journey would be to actually buy-in and challenge yourself by practicing each step of the process to thinking more like an entrepreneur. You can either look at this class as a way to half-ass assignments and give yourself credit, or to take the knowledge and skills the professor is offering, and apply them to a potential opportunity to actually see how things play out. This can not only help show you the basics behind businesses, but actually help you discover your interests and the path of business you want to go down and study. Additionally, I would truly recommend that the student follows the process and tries to understand the reasoning behind each assignment. This is the best way to help the student understand the purpose of this course and ultimately offer them an advantage with putting everything together and summarizing the basic characteristics of thinking like an entrepreneur.

29A – Venture Concept No. 2

BeyondKash

1) Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity

Mobile payment applications that are currently available for download through your mobile device's app store are a part of a very competitive market, and developers are having trouble establishing an intricate enough app design that will dominate the market. I believe that there is an opportunity to create a universal mobile payment application that allows all individuals to download and transfer money, fee-less, to clients, customers, friends and other businesses. 

The people involved in this current opportunity are the existing app developers, as well as the main target audience of customers/mobile users in search of finding an easy-to-use, low-fee, reliable and timely application to assist in moving and managing all their wallet needs. The reason current app developers meet the 'who' of my need is because they each have their own unique advantage to attract customers, but creating an app that combines each differentiator and adds a 'secret sauce' will ultimately dominate the user market. My main target audience for this app design would be current users and individuals who are looking for the 'perfect' money managing and transferring app.  The market of users that are in search of a reliable and all-in-one payment application are dispersed globally, and are categorized in all demographics throughout the world. This offers a high ceiling for my opportunity market as there will always be customers in search of a better way to manage their savings, transfer money and ultimately spend their earnings on what they want. 

Customers are currently satisfying this need through a variety of apps available that all offer similar options: sending/receiving money, setting up a universal credit card linked to the app, face ID and finger scanning payment options, messages, voice recordings, emojis and videos sent with the payment and many other unique opportunities for the user to utilize while on the app. These customers tend to have more than one account on competing applications, which clearly shows how loyal they are to using one specific app. This is due, in part, to having friends, clients, or other businesses that utilize one specific app as their 'preferred' payment method. The two specific areas that seem to be the main problem with customers throughout each app are that not every recipient they're trying to pay/receive from has the specific mobile payment app they have, and the costly fees that come along with transferring money. This  led me to realize a solution for the current issue in mobile payment applications. This opportunity is extremely tight, as there already are few dominant applications that control the majority of the mobile payment market industry. However, none of the current available applications solve the glaring problem of limiting/removing the fees and time that come with withdrawing and transferring each transaction through their apps. I believe this window of opportunity will be open until someone fulfills the need or figures out a more effective way to eliminate fees from the mobile users.

Innovation    

My company, BeyondKash, is offering to customers the ability to access their own universal mobile payment application that allows for spending, budgeting and saving all at the accessibility of your fingertips. 

BeyondKash allows users to:

• Send 
• Receive
• Withdraw money for no fee
• Add unlimited money to a personal credit card associated with the app 
• Avoid waiting multiple business days to have access to your money 
• The best part? Completely customize and manage your mobile spending and saving with the all-in-one hub feature that allows for notifications, easy contact access, payments by Face ID recognition, video notes as payment messages, and many other features. 

BeyondKash's target consumers are focused on those who are interested in downloading a universal mobile payment app that eliminates transaction and withdrawal fees. Our goal is to establish an application that charges a one time fee on the app store and eliminates any other fees applicable when sending money to contacts or companies. All of our customers interested are looking for an easy to navigate, all-in-one money saving and management app to help make purchasing goods and services much easier on the go. The app also targets customers in search of the ability to transfer money instantly to their contacts while also allowing them to instantly transfer their app balance to a connected bank account. BeyondKash's service and all of it's features can be found in the app store for a one time payment of $9.99. This fee would cover all of the included features on the application, as well as routine updates to make our customer's experience on BeyondKash as convenient and affordable as possible.

Venture Concept   

My innovation in creating the app BeyondKash will help solve the problem of added fees and wait time inr a universal mobile platform that allows users to send and receive currency to contacts, 

BeyondKash offers:

• An up-front payment style money transferring application
• Completely eliminates the hassle of withdrawal deductions
• Eliminates sending/receiving fees, 
• Eliminates timely/costly instant-transfers from current app balances. 

Our customers care because of concerns about current apps that operate their mobile payment and banking applications with hidden fees. 

BEYONDKASH IS UNIQUE IN THAT EVERYTHING IS COVERED BY A ONE TIME FEE THAT ELIMINATES ALL CHARGES, WAIT TIME AND ADDITIONAL FEES FROM MONEY TRANSFERS AND ACCOUNT WITHDRAWS. 

There are many apps available that perform similar actions to BeyondKash, but none offer the ability to pay a one time fee that eliminates all charges and additional fees from their money transfers and account withdraws. The application's unique modifier targets one of the main challenges of being a 'middle-man' money service by offering customers the ability to manage their money fee-less, while also contributing to creating a community that ultimately is featured around a complete user-friendly payment application.

Why BeyondKash?

I believe users will transition from current competitor applications to BeyondKash due to:

• Convenience 
• Timeliness
• Costliness
• Ease of an all-in-one application 
• And it’s popularity among users!

Expressing our key differences with rivals such as Venmo, CashApp, ApplePay, Zelle and more will help explain to users the problem with having multiple different platforms that all charge variable fees for actually transferring money to contacts. I believe these competitors' weaknesses include charging a variable fee per transaction on their platform, offering costly charges to be able to instantly withdraw money, and not being able to establish one complete application that users don't have to worry if the recipient has an associated account. Since my product/service is a technological application, I do not have to focus as much on packaging, distribution or location play, and can spend my time working on improvements to the app that will increase the customers experience and offer new improvements to handle any wallet needs. As users begin transition to BeyondKash and testing it's abilities, our price point will vary based on the traffic generated and there will be a 24/7 customer support center available right within the application. To continually support our application’s production, multiple teams with 3-7 employees are necessary. This would most likely include a production, design and technological team of certified app developers, a customer support center group and a sales/marketing team. All other business operations would be handled through the approval of the CEO and Owner, Cade Tolchinsky. 

I believe that my company's true "secret sauce" is creating the first universal mobile payment and managing applications that will attract users with its variety of features and low cost up-front payment fee. Users want more of their money being transferred without the current issues of time and fees; this is the exact problem that my company, BeyondKash, has found a solution for. Furthermore, BeyondKash's next major opportunity is to focus on marketing and advertising our platform to potential customers, while also influencing current users of competitor’s applications to transition over to BeyondKash. Assuming my company launched successfully and is generating traffic, I hope to take the skills, processes and knowledge I've acquired from BeyondKash and invest my time and money into designing and creating a product that will assist people in solving the everyday problems they face. 

2) and 3)

Due to receiving no feedback on my previous venture concept description and my "What's Next" exercise, I decided to leave feedback on my own venture concept to help me with finalizing and cleaning up the concept behind BeyondKash. To start, I went back and thought about all of the most common areas that my peers commented on when they left feedback and I tried to point out any overlooked mistakes in my own work. After going through it once, I reread my venture concept and started weeding out the areas that I felt were too wordy, off-topic or didn't help me convince my intended audience the opportunities that BeyondKash was solving. I knew that, in any venture concept, I had to identify what made my company different, so I added more detail about the application being more user-friendly and how it's features satisfy people's unmet money managing needs. I made sure to discuss each question and answer in great detail, while factoring in our main differentiators, to ultimately help show why BeyondKash is unique from the current competitors. Additionally, I thought about how to convince current customers in the market to switch from their current platform by emphasizing the idea of an all-in-one wallet-type platform that we believe will eventually become the main universal form of mobile payment. Lastly, I made sure to organize the formatting and design to look professional, while also including a rough outline of our logo to help display to our viewers the authenticity of our company and service, BeyondKash. 

28A – Your Exit Strategy

1) The exit strategy that I've planned for BeyondKash includes developing the software behind the application to contain each feature laid out in order to make sure our platform is completely user-friendly. After being implemented, I intend to find an investor or market competitor to either sell a percentage stake in BeyondKash in return for an investment, or completely sell my application to a buyer. I believe that this company could yield significant results and generate lots of net profit, but ultimately I've decided to rather pursue a company on something that I've done more planning and research with, and am willing to put in the effort and finances to go from a start-up to a multi-million dollar company. BeyondKash was able to provide with the business experience and insight into how to correctly follow the entrepreneurial process, and what to do throughout each step of the way.

2) l've selected this particular exit strategy due to the failure I encountered while developing the application for BeyondKash. I realized that I am more interested in creating a brick & mortar or click & mortar type business, rather than just a pure eCommerce type company. I find that I prefer to do research in a field of other competing products or services, rather than research apps and digital content that requires lots of technology knowledge and expensive finances. Although, the experience and skills I learned while designing BeyondKash offer me knowledge into online advertising, and ultimately utilizing social media platforms to build a community around my product/service. 

3) I believe that the exit strategy I chose was dependent on the type of business I wanted to run, and if I wanted to have a physical product or an online presence. Although, the opportunity I picked was chosen based on my vision of believing in a specific market and understand the audience and how to solve their wants. Additionally, I do believe that my exit strategy had an influence onto how I planned to acquire and use resources, as well as how much time and amount of money I was willing to invest into BeyondKash. These specific areas and my overall plan of action for this business were part of the reason why I decided to not pursue BeyondKash, and rather focus my energy into an opportunity that provides a greater ceiling. 

27A – Reading Reflection No. 3

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users, Guy Kawasaki

1) What was the general theme or argument of the book?

The general argument of the book was to offer insight on how to navigate social media platforms, how to advertise yourself professionally on social media accounts, and what content to create and offer to your followers. The reason he explains these concepts are because Guy Kawasaki believes that there are social media elements to include in your social media account to build a growing with followers that help build-up your community. The book teaches you the basic important lessons that would help build a community around your social media accounts online. 

2) How did the book, in your opinion, connect with and enhance what you are learning in ENT 3003?

In my opinion, the book connected with with what I'm learning in ENT 3003 in aspect of advertising and digital marketing to help grow and advertise a business. Kawasaki's book focuses mostly on the social media aspect of online advertising, but most of what he says crosses paths with the information Professor Pryor is discussing in his lectures. Kawasaki offers insight into how to use accounts to promote one another, make sure your image is professional, what content to share with followers and how to build a community around your hobbies. Similarly, Professor Pryor expresses the benefits of your biography, profile, way of expressing information, and who your audience is targeting. To continue, Guy Kawasaki expresses that creating content in the form of a blog is very valuable to relating to your social media growing, which is similar to how this class is structured in a blog format. This format allows us to learn how to express our ideas and answers in the form of 'posts' which is similar to creating content for a twitter feed and tweeting to your followers. 

3) If you had to design an exercise for this class, based on the book you read, what would that exercise involve?

If I had to design an exercise for this class based on the book I chose, I would ask the students to create a twitter account based on their product or service and require them to tweet information relating to opportunity and advertising their solution for it. This would help students understand about having an online social media presence and how to professionally express your opinions while growing your following around you. Also, this would demonstrate the different methods on how to advertise your business through one of the many social media platforms. 

4) What was your biggest surprise or 'aha' moment when reading the book? In other words, what did you learn that differed most from your expectations?

My biggest surprise while reading Kawasaki's book was finding out the other social media platforms being used for advertising business products and services, and how each social media platform focuses on a different aspect of advertising your business. Guy goes on to bring in examples of how Pinterest and Instagram force companies to learn how to adapt to advertising with mostly pictures and short captions, while Twitter allows businesses to include links, images, and directly tweet to another company or person. Ultimately, these requirements were not part of any of my expectations when I started reading this book, and I was actually shocked to find out how many other little features can be utilized to better advertise your company online.

26A – Celebrating Failure

Let's Fail, A Lot!

1) During this past semester, there's been many times outside of this class where I have experienced continuous failure. One specific time was when I was interested in learning how to drop ship products from a site like Alibaba.com, and advertise the products through social media platforms to sell out my inventory. I quickly learned a lot about suppliers, product distribution and storing inventory, while I was still slowly understanding social media advertising, such as Facebook and Instagram ads. After negotiating deals with suppliers on inventory products such as mini projectors, keychains, phone chargers and more, I experienced my first business lesson in not taking into account my product inventory and where I was going to store everything until it was sold. This led me to search around for a service that would house my products and distribute them when a transaction occurred. I found a way through Amazon to advertise on their platform and have them house my inventory until orders were placed, which would then have Amazon ship out for me at a small connivence fee. Over time, I started to realize a second issue with the cost of housing my inventory as the cost started to exceed my revenue I was generating from the actual sales of the products. I was stuck in a situation and decided that the best decision for me was to shut down all operations in order for me to figure out how to successfully drop ship, while still focusing on school and my grades. 

2) In the end I learned that, even though I experienced failure multiple times, there are still important life and financial lessons to be obtained while trying to operate any start-up company. These experiences and resources will only benefit me in the future as I now understand the importance of planning and actually taking the right steps to setting-up and creating a successful company. Not only does this include the specifics like inventory selection, web-designers or product distributers, but also helps the entrepreneur take into account the financial and management risks that come along with dedicating any time and effort to working on a start-up business.   

3) As I was excited to finally start generating revenue, the reality hit that I would never actually fulfill the figures that I was hoping for because of how I planned out my company. In my case, I was very emotional and disappointed because of the high hopes I had for this start-up distribution company with popular products. Additionally, I would say that this experience encouraged me to want to understand more about what I did wrong and learn from that knowledge to utilize my skills and drive on something that I'm dedicated to. Not only did the drop shipping business motivate me to want to take more risks, but ENT3003 has actually helped me define myself as an entrepreneur and find what avenue of business I want to study. I can confidently say that I am more likely to take a risk now than I was a few months ago because of how comfortable I am with the business process and how fueled I am with determination because of the experience I initially had with drop shippings. Mr. Pryor's class has ultimately taught me that failure is just as beneficial as it is consequential if you learn to adapt and put in effort to find the good from your mistakes. 

25A – What’s Next?

What's Next?

BeyondKash

Existing Market. 

Step 1: BeyondKash's next major opportunity is to focus on marketing and advertising our platform to potential customers, while also influencing current users of competitor’s applications to transition over to BeyondKash. Assuming my company launched successfully and is generating traffic, I hope to take the skills, connections and knowledge I've acquired from BeyondKash and invest my time and money into designing and creating a product that will assist people in solving the everyday problems they face. 

Step 3: I believe that as BeyondKash continues to grow it's popularity within users, it will start to become a universally accepted form of payment that can be used to pay friends, family, contacts and even local businesses. As current technologies modernize, I hope that my company can fulfill all of the wallet needs requested by users to ultimately create an easy mobile-payment method that can be accessed without the need of a credit-card or bank account. Additionally, I believe this will, and already has, start to revolutionize the forms of acceptable payment by most local and big businesses. 

New Market. Retired and Elderly.

Step 1: The radically different market I plan on researching and targeting are retired and elderly individuals. The reason why I chose to appeal to this specific group is because typically users involved with BeyondKash would be technologically advanced people between the ages of 15-59, and retired/elderly individuals fall outside of that range. 

Step 2: I believe that my company, BeyondKash, can appeal to this specific market in helping to set up direct deposit services, through our platform, to offer these specific individuals an all-in-one site that provides them with all of their financial insight. This could help with dealing with retirement funds, social security and insurance transactions, as well as offer a simple way for elderly individuals to have easy, traceable access to using their funds. 

Step 4:  What I learned most about this new market is that typically most elderly or retiring individuals are inexperienced with technology, and since our app is based on using your mobile device, we can offer a simple way for these users to navigate our platform. What ultimately surprised me the most was how involved this specific market of customers was with their finances and how complicated some banks make it on them. This helped me realize that this "radically' different market may actually offer insight on new features that can be added to make BeyondKash more user-friendly within older generations. Some of what I assumed was proven correct, but I was mostly surprised to acknowledge that this new market could actually have potential in helping to target new users who are unfamiliar with mobile payment and managing applications on their phones.

24A – Venture Concept No. 1

BeyondKash

Opportunity

Mobile payment applications that are currently available for download through your mobile device's app store are a part of a very competitive market, and developers are having trouble establishing an intricate enough app design that will dominate the market. I believe that there is an opportunity to create a universal mobile payment application that allows all individuals to download and transfer money, fee-less, to clients, customers, friends and other businesses. 

The people involved in this current opportunity are the existing app developers, as well as the main target audience of customers/mobile users in search of finding an easy-to-use, low-fee, reliable and timely application to assist in moving and managing all their wallet needs. The reason current app developers meet the 'who' of my need is because they each have their own unique advantage to attract customers, but creating an app that combines each differentiator and adds a 'secret sauce' will ultimately dominate the user market. My main target audience for this app design would be current users and individuals who are looking for the 'perfect' money managing and transferring app.  The market of users that are in search of a reliable and all-in-one payment application are dispersed globally, and are categorized in all demographics throughout the world. This offers a high ceiling for my opportunity market as there will always be customers in search of a better way to manage their savings, transfer money and ultimately spend their earnings on what they want. 

Customers are currently satisfying this need through a variety of apps available that all offer similar options: sending/receiving money, setting up a universal credit card linked to the app, face ID and finger scanning payment options, messages, voice recordings, emojis and videos sent with the payment and many other unique opportunities for the user to utilize while on the app. These customers tend to have more than one account on competing applications, which clearly shows how loyal they are to using one specific app. This is due, in part, to having friends, clients, or other businesses that utilize one specific app as their 'preferred' payment method. The two specific areas that seem to be the main problem with customers throughout each app are that not every recipient they're trying to pay/receive from has the specific mobile payment app they have, and the costly fees that come along with transferring money. This  led me to realize a solution for the current issue in mobile payment applications. This opportunity is extremely tight, as there already are few dominant applications that control the majority of the mobile payment market industry. However, none of the current available applications solve the glaring problem of limiting/removing the fees and time that come with withdrawing and transferring each transaction through their apps. I believe this window of opportunity will be open until someone fulfills the need or figures out a more effective way to eliminate fees from the mobile users.

Innovation    

My company, BeyondKash, is offering to customers the ability to access their own universal mobile payment application that allows for spending, budgeting and saving all at the accessibility of your fingertips. 

BeyondKash allows users to:

• Send 
• Receive
• Withdraw money for no fee
• Add unlimited money to a personal credit card associated with the app 
• Avoid waiting multiple business days to have access to your money 
• The best part? Completely customize and manage your mobile spending and saving with the all-in-one hub feature that allows for notifications, easy contact access, payments by Face ID recognition, video notes as payment messages, and many other features. 

BeyondKash's target consumers are focused on those who are interested in downloading a universal mobile payment app that eliminates transaction and withdrawal fees. Our goal is to establish an application that charges a one time fee on the app store and eliminates any other fees applicable when sending money to contacts or companies. All of our customers interested are looking for an easy to navigate, all-in-one money saving and management app to help make purchasing goods and services much easier on the go. The app also targets customers in search of the ability to transfer money instantly to their contacts while also allowing them to instantly transfer their app balance to a connected bank account. BeyondKash's service and all of it's features can be found in the app store for a one time payment of $9.99. This fee would cover all of the included features on the application, as well as routine updates to make our customer's experience on BeyondKash as convenient and affordable as possible.

Venture Concept   

My innovation in creating the app BeyondKash will help solve the problem of added fees and wait time inr a universal mobile platform that allows users to send and receive currency to contacts, 

BeyondKash offers:

• An up-front payment style money transferring application
• Completely eliminates the hassle of withdrawal deductions
• Eliminates sending/receiving fees, 
• Eliminates timely/costly instant-transfers from current app balances. 

Our customers care because of concerns about current apps that operate their mobile payment and banking applications with hidden fees. 

BEYONDKASH IS UNIQUE IN THAT EVERYTHING IS COVERED BY A ONE TIME FEE THAT ELIMINATES ALL CHARGES, WAIT TIME AND ADDITIONAL FEES FROM MONEY TRANSFERS AND ACCOUNT WITHDRAWS. 

There are many apps available that perform similar actions to BeyondKash, but none offer the ability to pay a one time fee that eliminates all charges and additional fees from their money transfers and account withdraws. The application's unique modifier targets one of the main challenges of being a 'middle-man' money service by offering customers the ability to manage their money fee-less, while also contributing to creating a community that ultimately is featured around a complete user-friendly payment application.

Why BeyondKash?

I believe users will transition from current competitor applications to BeyondKash due to:

• Convenience 
• Timeliness
• Costliness
• Ease of an all-in-one application 
• And it’s popularity among users!

Expressing our key differences with rivals such as Venmo, CashApp, ApplePay, Zelle and more will help explain to users the problem with having multiple different platforms that all charge variable fees for actually transferring money to contacts. I believe these competitors' weaknesses include charging a variable fee per transaction on their platform, offering costly charges to be able to instantly withdraw money, and not being able to establish one complete application that users don't have to worry if the recipient has an associated account. Since my product/service is a technological application, I do not have to focus as much on packaging, distribution or location play, and can spend my time working on improvements to the app that will increase the customers experience and offer new improvements to handle any wallet needs. As users begin transition to BeyondKash and testing it's abilities, our price point will vary based on the traffic generated and there will be a 24/7 customer support center available right within the application. To continually support our application’s production, multiple teams with 3-7 employees are necessary. This would most likely include a production, design and technological team of certified app developers, a customer support center group and a sales/marketing team. All other business operations would be handled through the approval of the CEO and Owner, Cade Tolchinsky. 

I believe that my company's true "secret sauce" is creating the first universal mobile payment and managing applications that will attract users with its variety of features and low cost up-front payment fee. Users want more of their money being transferred without the current issues of time and fees; this is the exact problem that my company, BeyondKash, has found a solution for. Furthermore, BeyondKash's next major opportunity is to focus on marketing and advertising our platform to potential customers, while also influencing current users of competitor’s applications to transition over to BeyondKash. Assuming my company launched successfully and is generating traffic, I hope to take the skills, processes and knowledge I've acquired from BeyondKash and invest my time and money into designing and creating a product that will assist people in solving the everyday problems they face. 

23A – Your Venture’s Unfair Advantage

What Makes You So Special?

BeyondKash

1. Previous sales and marketing experience. I developed these skills as part of publishing my own book and advertising through amazon and at in-person events.

- Valuable: This is extremely valuable as in any business or start-up, you need to have a specific marketing staff, or understand how to properly target your audience. 

- Rare: This is pretty rare as people may believe they have marketing experience or understand how to advertise, but in reality you learn these skills along with facing the challenges and difficulties when actually having to generate traffic for something.

- Inimitable- Although very useful, this skill is particularly easily to be replicated, and should be, in order to help the business or company grow and expand to target more customers. 

- Non-substitutable- I believe there are no other resources that can provide you with this experience and are only other resources to help simplify or teach you the process of marketing a product/service. 

2. Thinking through potential consequences (positive and negative) of each event, action or change before it's implemented. 

- Valuable: I believe this skill is valuable as it's part of my human capital to want to understand what will happen if something is adjusted, added or changed. This is helpful in shortening the research and development process of creating a product/service.

- Rare: Surprisingly, I believe this skill is more rare then people think, as plenty of businesses test during the R&D phases and do not fully understand the potential consequences or setbacks that may results from it. 

- Inimitable: I believe that, with effort, this skill can be replicated and used to the advantage of a business to help with determining what actually works. This ultimately saves a lot of valuable time and money that could be ventured onto other aspects of the product/service. 

- Non-substitutable: I believe there no other similar resources that can offer you such insight into your research and development due to the product/service design being unique to each specific business. This skill is helping companies to understand the potential outcomes before observed, which could limit time on testing new resources and ultimately spending money.

3. Web design and advertising. I learned how to properly create a website to advertise a product when learning how to professionally market to your target audience. 

- Valuable: I believe this skill is very valuable when it comes to helping grow your social capital, as websites are very expensive to buy and learning how to properly build one can limit your fees and help efficiently market your product.

- Rare: I do think that this skill is rare because of the effort needed to create a website, and how it's virtually easier to pay the expensive fees in order to have someone create one for you. 

- Inimitable: Yes, this skill is replicable but requires effort and years of practice, research and learning to ultimately understand how to create an efficient website like those offered, for a high-rate, by companies such as Wix.com. 

- Non-substitutable: There are definitely other resources to help create and design a website to market a specific product or service easier, but learning the skills will offer huge financial returns as well as true insight onto what's going on in the advertising market. 

4. Being able to communicate on a professional level. I gained experience on this skill after interning for a summer with a law firm.

- Valuable: This skill is valuable for every type of business as the main way anything will get done is through communications. Whether is be communicating with customers, partners, employees, or manufacturers, having proper and professional communication will help influence whatever to listen and want to comply with you. 

- Rare: This skill is somewhat rare because many business owners and their employees are failed to be taught how to properly communicate with customers in their market opportunity, and this leads potential buyers to chose similar products/services elsewhere. 

- Inimitable: I believe this skill can be easily learned or copied and can make a difference in gaining traffic for a particular product/service. Although not being 'rare', knowing how to properly communicate takes effort and time, but will definitely increase your businesses appearance and will leave a good reputation within customers. 

- Non-substitutable: There are no other resources that can provide similar benefits as communication, as it's important nowadays in our society to know how to properly talk with a customer, supplier or employee, or else nothing will ever get done. 

5. Finding and creating connections with similar businesses. 

- Valuable: This skill is extremely valuable as learning how similar businesses interact within the same opportunity gives insight to start-up companies on what works in terms of advertising, generating traffic and earning a profit. 

- Rare: This skill wouldn't seem rare as anyone can go out and talk to competing businesses, but ultimately creating a bond and working with one another is a unique attribute to contributing to expanding your business and audience.   

- Inimitable: I believe this skill is not easily able to be copied by others companies as most look at their competing businesses as rivals and don't necessarily believe their differentiator will generate them enough traffic to compete. 

- Non-substitutable: There are no resources that offer the same benefits that come from creating these connections with other businesses in your opportunity market. 

6. Knowledge of a product/service and it's current market.

- Valuable: Knowing a lot about a specific market helps new businesses target the aspects which they see generating a lot of traffic. This helps them add a unique factor to offer a 'better' version of what's currently available that will bring in those current customers. 

- Rare: This skill is not considered rare anymore as current technology allows anyone the ability to study what's making a specific market do well, and what aspects of a company are gaining a lot of attention from customers in the same opportunity. 

- Inimitable: I believe, with the right resources and effort, anyone can go out and study a market and how its customers are reacting. Although, I also believe that not anyone will make use of the information, find what increases the demand, and create a unique difference that will draw in the same customers to a 'better' product/service. 

- Non-substitutable: There are no specific resources that offer all knowledge in a single opportunity, but there are resources that can be utilized to help eliminate a lot of the time spent studying and understanding what's going on in a specific market. 

7. Using social media to your advantage. 

- Valuable: I believe this skill is valuable in knowing how to navigate social media platforms because they can be utilized for advertising, employee searching, testing/R&D, and learning user feedback on problems with current competitors in your market. 

- Rare: This skill is surprisingly rare as social media platforms have seen a boom in the last decade and having experienced and trained staff, or knowing how to operate yourself through such systems, can give you a competitive advantage over rivals. 

- Inimitable: I believe, as the resources continue to grow, this skill will be able to be easily copied by others due to amount of users, traffic and other markets already utilizing such tactics to target and expand their businesses. 

- Non-substitutable: There are no other specific resources that offer a wide variety of platforms, such as social media foundations, that are full of users interested in finding products and other ways to simplify or solve their daily life problems. 

8. Not having the willingness to give up. 

- Valuable: This skill is extremely valuable in any business situation as people who are not willing to give up easily are determined to find a solution to any problem that the business faces. These employees/business owners are the ones who defy negativity and advice from others to persevere and become the most successful. 

- Rare: This skill is rare because people generally give up when faced with a problem, and some may find a solution to that problem, but then are faced with another and give up. People without the willingness to just give up and not show effort, are the ones who become successful and teach others how to follow their paths. 

- Inimitable: I believe this skill is not something that can be easily copied. Many people naturally believe they're determined, but when faced with a challenging problem, or more than one, they either give up or freak out when the answer isn't obvious. 

- Non-substitutable: There are definitely no other similar resources that can be used to replicate the benefits of having the characteristic of not willing to give up. This is typically because it's a natural personality trait that some people posses more than others, not something that can be easily taught or learned. 

9. Financial support.

- Valuable: I believe this skill is very valuable to starting any type of business or company as the main failure of start-ups is not being able to generate enough finances to continue with the R&D and ultimately finalizing your product/service.

- Rare: I believe this ability is rare to have at the beginning of the company, as many business owners are working with limited out-of-pocket funds or risking everything they have just to start-up.

- Inimitable: I believe having this opportunity is not easily copied and is dependent on person-to-person.

- Non-substitutable: There are many other resources that could substitute financial support, as owners can apply for loans, pawn valuable items, or even search for financial investors in return for a percentage owned of the company. 

10. Finding a unique differentiator. 

- Valuable: Being able to find something that makes your product/service unique from other companies is extremely valuable allows customers to have multiple options when surveying which to buy. 

- Rare: This skill is rare to posses as most business owners/entrepreneurs have trouble coming up with something unique to slightly improve or change a product and call it their own. 

- Inimitable: I believe this skill is not easily copied and can't be taught to others, as only people who are naturally more creative have an advantage over others.

- Non-substitutable: I believe there are also many different opportunities to change a current product/service to make it unique besides it's physical attributes or natural abilities. For example, being able to manufacture one specific part cheaper already offers you an advantage over current competing companies.

Reflection:

After conducting the VRIN analysis with each of my resources, I believe that the resource that will benefit me the most is being able to find a unique differentiator within current products/services to ultimately make easier an everyday issue. Some businesses focus on creating a solution and being innovative for a new problem that people are facing, while others focus on fixing a current problem/solution that people face in a more efficient way. These companies are trying to triumph the market in their own way and having the ability to think about a current product that solves an issue, and offer a unique addition/difference to make it personalized and attract more customers, is something that I believe can be extremely useful in the business world. I believe this skill is more effective then the other resources listed, as this skill is something I believe is unique to me and can help improve/modernize current products or services to be more applicable for todays generations and societal standards.