Class no 15
Class Outline:
1:00 Welcome guests
1:15 Presentations
3:15 Break
3:30 Presentations
6:00 Making Merry
DELIVERABLES:
The primary deliverable for presentation day is your Kickstarter draft campaign. This encompasses a lot: You need completed prototypes for the video and photography in the campaign; You need a cost structure for your rewards; You need a project budget in order to set your goal.
How to present the campaign page? Navigating the campaign page on screen in front of your peers and guest will not work. Instead, take screen shots of your campaign page and use those to compose slides. This will make it easier for your audience to digest, see details, and keep pace. It will enable you to choreograph the presentation effectively so that you hit the important points and keep to a solid thread.
Other slides? Yes, please. Break down your financial models for us. Do not show your spread sheet. Instead, explain to us what inputs are driving the equation: What are your fixed costs? What are your variable costs? What are the resulting breakeven and profitability numbers? What are your margins and why does that matter?
In addition to the bottom up financial model, educate us on the competitive landscape and share competitive pricing examples. Especially when your product occupies a crowded market space, show us the neighboring products and point out the gap those products leave unaddressed.
What about the hypothesis? Yes, that too! This will be especially useful in making obvious your target market. So if you are not super specific on the WHO part of the statement, do some more thinking and talking on that this coming week.
You have all done a lot to get to this point. You do not need to recap everything for this presentation. I would prefer that you do not spend time telling us about the roads you chose not to travel. Of course, in cases where earlier work informed your current path in a significant way, it is fully acceptable to weave a chronological tale. But if your Quickstarter and/or early concepts really have nothing to do with the current trajectory of your project, don’t spend any time on them.
Please bring your physical prototypes to the presentation. Please make an IRL demo a part of your presentation. Doing so makes a huge difference in effectively communicating your solution to the audience.
Ending slide: Next steps. Tell us what you plan to do over the break to validate your hypothesis, put your assumptions to the test, and cultivate an audience. I am really hoping you will take advantage or travel or just the break from the academic schedule to engage with real live people to get feedback on your assumptions and your product solution,
Other semester deliverables:
Website up and running with a blog post per week. If you missed some weeks, you can make those up now. You have until the end of finals week to get it done. If you would prefer to make up your missing posts over the break you can, but you’ll have to do twice as many to earn full credit. Failure to followthrough on during-break-make-up-posts will start you off with a deficit for the Spring semester. Example: if you are short 4 posts for the Fall semester but promise to make them up over the break, you will receive full credit for the posts, but you will need to create 8 posts over the break to clear the debt. If you default on the debt, your Spring semester grading will be based on the completion of 23 posts (15+8) rather than the normal 15 posts.
Website setup with email collection. Make your landing page into a teaser for your campaign complete with an email collection form. If you are using a website that needs to be maintained for other purposes, then feel free to make this a page on that site other than the landing page.