Ryan Stotesbury

I want to thank everyone for your feedback and constructive criticism, I really appreciate your comments :) I wrote a reflection based on everything received so far here: https://virtual.educ.ubc.ca/wp/etec522/2017/08/11/a3-reflection-for-open-allies-venture-pitch/ Thank you everyone :)

FEEDBACK: Great pitch, Ryan! I’m excited to see you took the emerging Maker movement and angled your pitch to help satisfy growing demand in the market. One of my strongest convictions in my teaching philosophy is the importance and power of learning from mistakes, and I think you identified one of the key educational benefits of a maker centered venture. Justin made some excellent comments regarding marketing and social media that I agree with; taking advantage of the movement’s social nature via online communities is a surefire way for free marketing success! I think the small-scale ‘start-up’ box is a good way to get your foot in the door into schools interested in starting maker movements; to pique investor interest even further, consider adding some more ‘box’ kits that will follow your initial cedar-box. As a teacher, I am interested in the kit you are offering, however as an investor, I’d be curious as to what kits will follow, and your strategy in keeping the business sustainable once you’ve shipped your initial targets on the ‘start-up boxes’. I love the ‘mobile gurus’ idea – as your venture scales with more and more subscriptions, consider a plan for the logistics of shipping / transporting new kits to your subscriber-base or an alternative to shipping (especially heavy wood boxes): my suggestion is to create a ‘home-base’ makerspace where your customers can pick-up their monthly kits while getting support and workshops, saving you on the costs and logistics of shipping while providing a place to attract ‘drop-in’ customers who may not be ready to commit to your product without testing and tinkering first. Great work, Ryan!

FEEDBACK: Your pitch identifies a fantastic opportunity; however I would love some more details on how you will take advantage of the lack of VR in schools. I think I have many questions before I could invest in this venture, specifically the tangible educational benefits you can offer to students. Consider some of these questions to refine your pitch for the education market: What kind of educational software will you use? What are some of the benefits to the software? How can schools justify spending money on your venture? What grade levels and subjects will you target? What types of PD/conferences will your venture market at, and how will you make your venture applicable to educational contexts?

FEEDBACK: I love this business idea, Albert! I like the analogy of a sports manager helping an athlete through every aspect of their career so they can focus on their performance. While you are in direct competition with tutoring agencies like Kunmen or Sylvan, I think you have differentiated your services nicely. I think that targeting the home-school market is a great start, but it would be great to expand into the K-12 sector, specifically at high schoolers in grades 11 or 12; these students would benefit the most from your services for specialized consulting about university entrance and tailored tutoring options. Diversifying even more, you could focus on the growing segment of international students in higher-ed, who may not be aware of the myriad of educational services available while studying in Canada. For me to invest fully into this venture, I'd love to see a more fleshed out idea of how to market your services, especially to your main target demographic of home-schooled students, but this is a minor nitpick for an overall great idea.

REVIEW: This is a unique pitch, in that your company is already established, and your target investors are specific to the context of your organization. With this in mind, I think it was a very strong pitch, and if I was on the board of directors at Lethbridge College, I would definitely invest in this venture’s growth. You defined the pain points extremely well, and situated your pitch to solve each issue with comprehensive details. The ColLab facilitator certificate seems like a promising program to offer other post-secondary educators, and as the growing popularity of makerspaces and collaborative spaces increases, I think a demand for facilitators trained in the skills you are offering makes your pitch extremely viable for investors. The incentive to increase productivity across the entire campus is a definite selling point for higher-ed administrators, and as your venture achieves more success and concrete data on improvements, it will also help to improve the expansion of your venture into the other markets you identified. Inviting investors to participate in your workshops is also a nice perk, as well as great selling point to help your funding reach critical mass, as the professional networks of administrations do a portion of marketing for you! As an EVA, I would recommend my company to invest funding to meet your venture’s goals.

FEEDBACK: Try to add some more energy and enthusiasm in your audio recordings; it seemed as though you were having a tough time recording! There are also frequent audible gasps and exasperated sighs, leading to a feeling of a general lack of conviction in the delivery of your pitch. From an investor’s point of view, I would be very reluctant to back a venture where the CEO is lacking passion and commitment for their project, therefore focus on delivering your ideas with vigour and positivity, as if you truly believe in the strength of your venture. Incorporating more textual information to accompany your recording will help investors digest your pitch much better; I found it difficult to review some of the finer details, as PPT does not allow ‘rewinding’ of audio to go over some of the details. Seeing as your venture is centered around the development and marketing of a mobile app, I think you really need some prototypes of your product to showcase to investors in this pitch, as well as examining the small competition you identified in further detail. If there are only a handful of competing apps in this market, I think looking at them and examining their weak points and then highlighting your apps strong points would go a long way to differentiating your ideas in the highly competitive, and hugely saturated educational app market.

REVIEW: This is an extremely creative pitch, and I love the fictional kickstarter campaign, team, and board of directors! My biggest issue as an EVA looking to invest in your venture is that your app doesn’t really seem to be differentiated from the countless other meditation apps out there, and I find it difficult to set your ideas apart from the competition. A platform like http://www.headspace.com has a HUGE market share, with free guided meditation recordings on their website and app, that are all applicable to youth. Many of these apps are also based on educational theory and the guided meditation format, unless specifically tailored to business/adult contexts, are easily consumed and used by students. Likewise, the ability to control the time and duration of computer-based activities exist in other apps, so the integration of this feature into your app doesn’t seem like a major selling point. With the intense competition of the app market, and the entrenched companies you will be facing off against, I feel reluctant to agree with the optimistic growth projections in your pitch. For these reasons, as an EVA I could not recommend investment into your venture.

REVIEW: This is a strong pitch, Justin! Faced with such a large and diverse curriculum to cover over the whole year, high-school English teachers usually gloss over formal grammar lessons quickly, in favour of more interesting units such as poetry, drama, short-stories, novel study, creative writing etc. This means students usually are not getting the fundamentals of grammar taught consistently throughout the year, and as such their writing suffers horribly. I love the combination of mobile-learning, and micro-learning in a fun platform to encourage learning grammar. Encouraging students to complete short units every week means they are consistently improving their skills, and not having to ‘cram’ grammar points into their brains over the course of a short 2-week unit that is sandwiched between other units. As a teacher in an EFL context, grammar is a constant issue, however as a subject teacher (History/Socials/Media Studies/ Computer Information Systems) I do not have time to explicitly teach grammar issues while covering my class curriculum. Identifying the key re-occurring issues (such as problems with active/passive voice), and then prescribing relevant units from MicroGram is a perfect solution! Your pitch’s CUBE analysis is an extremely comprehensive and compelling case for the merits of your venture, and you have clearly made your case for its success. You also thoroughly highlighted your competition’s flaws while displaying your venture’s ability to outperform them. Your business plan is clear and shows achievable goals that will utilize investor’s funding effectively. With these factors in my mind as an EVA, I would definitely recommend investing in your venture.

FEEDBACK: This is a great pitch, and presents a compelling solution to many pain-points of LMS software. I love the Mr. Robot references in your venture’s team; with the skills of your ‘white-hat’ (love it) engineer, I think you definitely would have an edge on your competition. I think to improve it further, you need to examine newer LMS competition such as Canvas, Desire2Learn, and EdX that are starting to challenge Blackboard and Moodle for market share. These new platforms have nearly all of the same features you are promising for LastDash, and have a strong and established presence in the market. Canvas in particular is built using the “Ruby on Rails” programming language, enabling seamless app and plug-in integration for numerous features and external products, including assessment analytics and automated (AI) tasks (https://www.canvaslms.com/higher-education/features).

REVIEW: This is a fantastic pitch, Jakin. Taking the opportunities presented by the growing makerspaces market, and applying it to the contexts of the sharing-economy is a viable and exciting prospect for a venture. The complete lack of competition makes your pitch instantly stand-out among other educational ventures, and your projected revenue looks extremely attractive in terms of return on initial investment. The explosive growth of similar sharing-economy platforms like AirBnB and Uber make the growth potential seem very viable. I think partnering with companies who develop Maker technology like MakerBot (3D printing) or MakeMedia (magazine/community) would also be a great idea; these companies could offer discounts on equipment / media subscriptions to users of Soma, in exchange for greater market penetration of their products: a win-win for your venture! My first concern was the liability issues with dangerous equipment causing safety or damages, however you have foreseen this challenge by partnering with Nest and AIG. As a self-professed supporter of the Maker-Movement, and as an EVA who is passionate about spreading these ideals, I would definitely recommend an investment in your venture.