Week 10: Creating Competitive Advantage

 Creating Competitive Advantage

       I have learned in my journey in the technopreneurship subject, particularly in the 10th week, that in startups, having a competitor is healthy, because it implies that I am really trying to solve an existing feasible problem. It's not about the uniqueness you have with your product, rather its about how you meet the needs of your customers. Our group, the HeartSeekers' startup idea was to develop a mobile application, which aims to solve the apparent problem wherein students, such as Computer Engineering Students, waste their time store-hopping just to find out that the item they're looking for is unavailable. Our competitors involve Facebook Marketing, Shopee, and Lazada, as these companies sell products, especially integrated circuits and show the availability of their items. 

    In order to have a competitive advantage, startup strategy is important. Startup strategy is an imprtant ingredient for startup success. The heartseekers strategized to interview the business owners of integrated circuits, or at the very least, the employees involved. In this way, we hoped to discover the strengths and weaknesses of our product compared to the product of our competitors. And through these, we can spot an advantage we can exploit, and create a competitive advantage. Lastly, it validates our goals, as students aren't the only concern of our product, but also the business owners as well.

   I disseminated a rendezvous with my members. Unfortunately, we were shorthanded by a member, as one of our member, Angel Mae Cansico, had a health condition of hemodialysis. That leaves us to three members. However, during the meeting time, one of our members was absent. His reason was that he had an outing with his family. So I deferred and moved the interview date. Moving on to the next interview date, Angel was still in hemodialysis, so I excused her, as I simply imagined if I was in her shoes. Renzo however, despite telling the interview date ahead of time, still wasn't present due to same reasons. Time was short, and I decided to interview the business owners with Jhon Anober only. 

     After the interview, we discovered that Integrated Circuits business owners, two of them have no online platform. On the other hand, one business owner said that their products have loss of item inventory during deliveries. Also, items are being returned because of defect. From these pointers, we decided that the competitive advantage we have on competitors is, intuitively, our partnership with business owners. We also decided to make real-time inventory information to prevent product loss of business owners in deliveries, and for students to have informed-decision when buying products on integrated circuit stores.