20A - Growing Your Social Capital

First Person:

1.     I have reached out to Jon Livingston who is a family friend of my family. Jon has a background in app development and owns and operates an application called “Deer Lab” that is focused on helping hunters track deer.

2.     Jon Livingston will be filling the domain expert slot.

3.     He is a family friend so I called him up and talked to him

4.     Mr. Livingston offered me some really good feedback. I believe he would be willing to help me develop the app from a technical standpoint if I need him to. He seemed intrigued by the idea as he has not heard of a similar one before but also warned me that the application development business is a difficult field to enter and to be prepared for that.

5.     Including Jon in my network will allow me to learn from someone who has coding experience and software development skills. Those are both very difficult skills to acquire so I believe it gives me a head start in that area.

Second Person:

1.     For my second person, I reached out to JP Hutchison who is a manager at Study Edge in Gainesville, Florida.

2.     This person is filling the expert on my market.

3.     I found the person through a mutual friend that works at Study Edge and I went in and spoke to him this past week.

4.     JP didn’t really do me any favors or hint at the possibility of one in the future. We stayed on the topic of the market that we both would be serving, which are college students at the University of Florida.  He gave me some valuable feedback on what the college student type of customer is looking for in a product. He told me to be useful, that being useful is the most important aspect of a college student catered product/service.

5.     Including this person in my network will allow me to speak to someone that has much more experience selling to the same market that I also would be serving.

Third Person:

1.     The third person that I spoke to was Andrei Larion, who is a sophomore student at the University of Florida and a part owner in a college student cleaning company.

2.     I am filling the supplier on my market slot with Andrei.  

3.     I found the person because we are friends and I know him personally. I talked to him in person.

4.     The exchange was very casual as we are close friends. I started off the conversation by telling him a little bit about my idea and he told me that it was a great idea but he was unsure about how successful it would really be. He told me that the basic idea is great but the logistics on how to carry it out would have to be extremely thought out and perfect.

5.     Including Andrei in my network will allow me to speak to someone who is constantly serving a college student customer base by being hired by students to clean their apartments, houses, etc. He has much more experience than I do on how to deal with the consumer base.

Reflect: This experience differed much more from my experiences in the past. I did not enjoy this one as much because it was very inorganic. I have been a part of a lot of networking nights throughout my college experience and the organizations that I am in have allowed me great networking opportunities. This one was useful but I thoroughly enjoy the experiences that are more organic.