Our second week in Rotterdam helped us to with our business model and finances, where we realized how high the initial investment is needed and what are the prices for every package offered in order to make the business profitable.
Biljana gave us several advices while helping us developing our balance sheet, and seeing what are the costs we had to add that we where possibly not taken into consideration. Having this clear after 4 days of full work, is where we started to think about other possibilities, apart from the second hand and buying furniture to companies in Catalonia, this is where we started looking for Chinese furniture companies, the cost of our assets would be lower if we import our furniture from them. We started looking for the regulations in Spains as well as the costs of the manufacturers from China, which helped reduce some of the initial investment and probably have some profits until the second year after the business starts.
Apart from the classes at RBS, we had the opportunity to meet with other Entrepreneurs in Venture Cafe, which where helpful giving us some insights that we never thought about it or it was so implied that we forgot to put it on action.
So what we think we need to do for starting testing is to have at least one basic package or pieces of furniture by separate, put them on lease, in order to see in a more detailed form how is the process, the user experience and missed parts we haven’t thought about it.
Every person we met at the network event gave us their impression about the business idea, some of them more oriented into the expansion and others going through the economic and investment area. (which is the one we’re having more problems due to the high investment needed)
Our thoughts of this week are:
It was a successful and interesting night for our business idea, due to all the advice and insights we could get from people already starting their businesses, but the one we were most excited is to see people really liking the idea and seeing potential on it, also the probability to expand into Rotterdam, another city with a big amount of students.
The second one is that we have a more clarity in the financial area, and next step is thinking how we can manage to reduce the costs we have into the business in order to increase the profits.