Guest Speaker - John Dimmer

     Just like our other guest speakers, John Dimmer was a man with plenty knowledge as well as loads of self experience.  His presentation was a lot more technical than our other guest speakers. He constantly went into details about being an entrepreneur and provided the detailed situations and solutions for our businesses. One thing that John said really caught my attention, this was the fact that when he first started his first business he felt unsure and not ready. This above all else really resonates with me. I am only 21 years old and close to finishing my bachelors, I don't think this is the best time for me to start any business, I do believe that working in the industry might be better for the simple fact that I can learn a lot more and hopefully use my honed skills to create something better at the age of maybe 25 than I can now.

     John did something similar to this, he went to school for finance/accounting and after finishing he got hired for his first job. During his first job he did exceedingly well and was able to climb the ranks of the company as well as learn a tremendous amount. After gaining his new found knowledge as well as gaining some maturity, he decided to start his own business. This is sort of the approach I would like to take and hopefully an opportunity to do this will arise. One problem that I did have which maybe not too many others did was I got pretty lost at a couple different moments, he is a technical kind of guy, but to someone without that kind of expertise it can get a bit confusing. He tried his best however to explain it on simpler terms, but there was some complicated topics floating around that day.

     Regardless of that, John Dimmer was an excellent guest speaker, he really filled the void by being a really technical guy, that also related a lot to us students because of his background. I had a great time and on a side note it was nice to see John our teacher Andrew together, they seem like very close friends. Overall great presentation and I hope to see John again one day, hopefully after i'm ready to start my business.

How Much Will I Charge (and Why)

      Continuing my journey of becoming and entrepreneur, I recently started to take a look on how much exactly I would want to charge for my product. As a refresher my product is a digital water bottle that can keep track of how much water a person intakes and make sure daily goals are reached through a smartphone app. Now after doing some research and seeing if there was actually a market for this I came across a company called Hidrate Spark. They have the exact same product as what I want to create but with some differences as well. They currently price their product at $54.95. After doing some more research one of my design choices that is not used in their product is having a insulated bottle. The reason for the extra layer of insulation is for drinks to stay cold or warm depending on how the buyer likes it. With this difference alone I would up the cost to around $60 or even $65. My number one goal when creating this product is quality. I want to create a durable and reliable product and with that in mind I settled for the price of $64.95. I believe that people will pay for higher quality, no one wants to keep buying cheap products over and over that will just break in the near future. I want my product to be lively in design as well as highlight all the software features that comes along with it. Long lasting products is the way I would direct my company and future business endeavors. Overall the price of $64.95 is the price needed to create a quality product and as stated earlier people buy quality and my product will be top quality.

Guest Speaker - Brian Forth

      My third guest speaker was a man named Brian Forth, the founder of SiteCrafting. A little backstory, Brian former job was a school teacher. During his teaching years computers were becoming more and more relevant and his school wanted to expose students so that they can start learning how to use them. Brian used this opportunity to teach his class how to build a website, being someone who has already done it in the past before, he was already experienced at doing it. As he was teaching the kids, he had some parents come into the class who were businessmen that had asked for him to create a website for various people. After doing this for a period of time he decided to quit his job as a teacher and to create website for others full time. This is where he launched his company called SiteCrafting.

      What I really enjoyed hearing from Brian that I didn't get as much of from the other guest speakers was the sheer amount of determination and time he puts in to the quality of work he does. Not that the other guest speakers don't do that. However Brian took a good portion of time talking about it and you could see the honesty in his eyes. He is a man that puts quality over quantity which he spoke about when he said something along the lines of people will spend more money for quality which I believe to be 100% true. As a future software developer I believe in creating good quality software that I could look back and be proud of. This is what Brian Forth did with his company and that is a portion of how he became as successful as he has. Also if I were to become an entrepreneur and another aspect I enjoyed from Brian was how close he gets with his employes. Building a good relationship with your employees is vital to any operation whether your company is small or large. Overall Brian Forth was an awesome guest speaker with a lot of valuable information and helpful insight. I can tell he is wise and on a more personal level he is genuine nice guy. As always it was a pleasure meeting him and I hope our paths cross again one day.