Thursday, February 16, 2017

Guest Lecture from John Dimmer [TINST475]

I appreciated the getting the chance to hear the views and learn from Mr. Dimmer's experience. His view of entrepreneurship provided some contrast to the instructor's views, especially when it came to the reason for being an entrepreneurship (his focus primarily being to grow a company and make money, while the instructor viewed entrepreneurship as an opportunity to do something your passionate about). His information on the funding side of the business was very interesting an applicable. I definitely appreciated the discussion of equity dilution, including the equation for calculating percent of the company sold. Additionally, his discussion about the importance of maintaining more than 50 percent of a company, and methods for raising money that do not involve selling equity was also fascinating. I am very interested in searching out business plan competitions and looking to crowd-sourcing for some of my funding. I wish he had touched on crowd funding more as an option for raising funds. Something I hope there is a bit more of in this class is a more clear description of how to go about the legal process of creating a company. In that vein, I found the information Mr. Dimmer presented about the different types of structures for company to be very illuminating, and something I hope that gets touched on further over the coming weeks. Finally, I was simply blown away to hear Mr. Dimmer's estimates for the total amount that angel investor groups would put into a single raise! I never would have expected anywhere from 500,000 to 2.5 million. This was a very interesting guest lecture, and I am very thankful that Mr. Dimmer came to speak to the class!

-Don

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

How I will protect the IP of my business [TINST 475]

For my new business idea of creating simple, yet fun tutorial games to teach video game illiterate people the basics of games, I will need to protect my IP. Primarily this will be accomplished through the use of Copyrights, Trademarks, and potentially a patent. Obviously, things like the name of my company and names of the developed games and software would be placed under copyright protection. Additionally things like any mascots I create, game assets, and narrative structures would be protected under copyright. My company would have little use for trade secrets. I would likely trademark any sort of catch-phrase that I use in advertising. That leaves the final type of IP protection, patents. Unfortunately as my company is primarily a software development company, patents are a bit of a tricky landscape to navigate. Software patents are tough because they often define things which are generic or vague. They also tend to not be particularly enforceable in many cases because of how non specific they are (there are a ton of ways to circumvent the patent through minute changes) The types of patents that I would be able to file would pertain to my methods of teaching users about game mechanics. This could be tough as it is fairly nebulous in the definition, and could possibly not be granted on those grounds. Otherwise, there really is no other use for a patent in my company. So, in summation, my primary method of protecting my IP would be copyright, followed by trademarks, and possibly patents.

-Don

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

What I Would Charge for my Augmented Reality Escape the Room Experience [TINST 475]

This blog post is going to discuss what I will charge my customers to participate in my augmented reality escape the room experience. To arrive at a price, I first did some research. From my own experience participating in room escapes, I am aware that the pricing strategy is typically a per person, ticket charge. This means that the more people that go through the room in one go, the more money I will make. This strategy seems like a good fit for my business, because I will be providing relatively expensive technology to each player (whether it is an app, a headset, or some other device) the cost should scale with the number of participants. In addition, a quick Google search revealed that escape the room experiences typically cost between 25 to 30 dollars per ticket. Additional searching found that my nearest competitors charge around 27 dollars. I conveniently have access to a relatively low rent commercial space and my initial employees will make minimum wage, which as of January 1st is 11 dollars. The most expensive component of my business will be the augmented reality hardware and software, and any initial build out of the rented space. Thankfully, my plan is to reduce build out and puzzle costs through the creative use of the augmented reality portion. Taking all of these things into consideration, I have decided to set my ticket price at 32 dollars per ticket. Despite this higher price, I believe that I will be able to sustain adequate traffic for a variety of reasons. For one, I have no escape the room competitors in the immediate area, the nearest being Tacoma. Secondly, the pricing is not too far off of the average, and is appropriate considering the expensive technology being implemented. Finally, to drive more traffic, I will be running a promotion where if you manage to escape the room (following the rules and on the first attempt) in the fastest recorded time, your experience will be free. I expect this to drive a lot of traffic initially, as well as promoting a spirit of competition in my guests.