After I signed up for my Twitter account, which was about my fifth social media account, I could not believe how difficult it is to manage each one individually. From this struggle, an idea was born. What if we re-imagined how we connect to one another on social media?

The Problem

For undergraduate students looking to build their professional network, it is inconvenient to exchange and maintain multiple social media profiles during the networking period. Although not directly affected by the problem, event organizers can benefit from using our app to help foster community and connections at their events.

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The Solution

My partner and I came up with a cross-platform mobile application that provides a structured and aggregated platform for quick and easy connecting. Users can follow and gain access to all of another’s social networking profiles with a single scan of a QR code. Features would include:

• Create profile with aggregate social media presence 
• Scan QR code to easily connect to another profile during a face-to-face interaction
• See past connection history - allows users to revisit profiles and continue to develop relationships at their leisure

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LILIE New Venture Challenge

Because we felt the idea was so compelling, we were accepted into an entrepreneurship class to pursue the opportunity. Over the course of the semester, we developed a business plan, built a prototype, and tried to validate our solution.

Outcome

In the end, however, we decided that the idea was not a "winner". The most obvious aspect of the semester that did not work was simply the idea. My partner and I had come up with the idea in February of 2020, just as the pandemic was growing. We were unable to work on the idea throughout the semester due to restrictions outlined by our Facebook internships. As a result, the idea went on the backburner. Over the next few months, the way people communicated and networked radically changed. By the time the semester started, our idea felt stuck in a pre-pandemic era. This made it super difficult to evaluate many of our assumptions, resulting in a lot of uncertain guesswork.

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Greatest Challenges

The first major challenge I had throughout the course was handling uncertainty in our idea and the market. As an engineer, I like to have a defined problem with specified inputs and outputs. In entrepreneurship, all of that is unknown. I struggled with coming up with a definitive way to address the many uncertainties when we were outlining our business plan in the first half of the course. For example, creating plans for the short-term, medium-term, and long-term felt a little silly. We did have our short-term plan fairly defined because we would focus on Rice undergraduate students.Beyond that, however, our goals felt very vague. We ended up choosing to expand to other Texas universities in the medium-term and then nationwide in the long-term. This plan felt like the right plan because we had some understanding of campus organizations. At the same time, there were hundreds of other possibilities we did not explore. Another example was when we were calculatingLTV and COCA. Many of the numbers we put down felt like guesswork, and when the numbers didn’t make sense, we arbitrarily moved them around until they did. This did not feel scientific or precise in any respect. I was frequently unsettled because I was not sure if we made the right decision. After writing this, I realize this sums up what entrepreneurship and startups are all about –creating under extreme uncertainty. It was very challenging to make a decision with very little data.

Extending off of this idea of uncertainty, I found it challenging to draw conclusions with any sort of confidence. Although our various experiments created results, I was often unsure why the experiment produced specific results and whether these results were reliable. For example, theWomen in Tech + Biz Event showed that 45% of people provided three or more profiles but none interacted with them. We have data indicating that this virtual-based format of Connect was unsuccessful, but I have no idea why. Were people providing their social media because they thought it was mandatory? Were they simply hoping that people would connect with them? On the other side, why did people not try to connect with one another? Was it that people were too engaged in the event? Alternatively, did we simply not convey the usefulness of the web app enough? It felt like this experiment created more questions than it answered. After pondering so many different perspectives, my mind began spinning with possibilities. Obviously, more time would have enabled us to iterate on this pretotype and get results from additional events. This would give us more confidence in the validity of our idea. Even with additional data, however, I’d need the data to be consistently screaming “this is a good idea” before I have any confidence in the business.

My final challenge was the prospect of putting myself out there to validate the idea with the probability of failure being so high. As an introvert, trying to talk to customers, reach out to organizations, and self-promote my idea put me out of my comfort zone. I knew it was important to interact with potential customers, but it felt scary every time I did. Upon reflection, I think the root issue was a fear of public failure. Naturally, it is much easier to publicize success and deal with failures internally. In school, this works very well because only I can see a failing exam grade. InBUSI 469, I found entrepreneurship to be quite the opposite. If I had worked on Connect without talking to customers, the idea could still have potential. Unfortunately, the idea is only validated publicly. That means, Connect had to fail in front of other people, which feels like an embarrassing result. Frequent failure is a part of the entrepreneurship process, but certainly something I was not accustomed to. School typically teaches students to be great at avoiding risks, so handling the no-go verdict on Connect was a bit difficult but a good learning experience.

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