Welcome to our blog post.
Our team is conformed by:
María Amín, Graphic Designer, Colombia.
Andrea Cadena, Interior Designer, Ecuador
Rodrigo Alemán, Industrial Designer, México.
This is the first idea of a business plan that came out of our minds, it has evolved since the first day, till where we are now, so in this entry you're gonna read a brief review and our perception of them to settle you on our project.
María:
Initially, my idea revolved around student housing. I believe most successful businesses nowadays are thriving because they’re solving a problem. I believe every business is inspired by a need or desire and that’s where I wanted to go with my idea.
Moving to a new country, new city, is not easy. I knew that but I didn’t know what a struggle was to look for a place to live in Barcelona. It’s either too much paperwork or too expensive, or too small, or too far away. Bottom line was, it was a problem I wasn’t aware of and it wasn’t just me, but many other foreign students moving to Barcelona were dealing with this same problem. Asking around, I discovered this was something common and many other students were having the same issue. So my idea was mostly inspired by that - I asked myself, why is it so complicated to find where to live if we’re moving to a city where university life is popular and so many students move to this city every year? Why isn’t there an easier way? As students, we’re not here to spend over 5000 euros once we move here. As students, we come here to study and learn and we don’t need that kind of stress in our daily life.
My idea was ambitious. I started to think about creating a student network to make life simpler and easier for students. Where you could get a home just as easy as buying a plane ticket. I wanted to solve a student's problem with housing and eventually develop this network into a student platform - starting in Barcelona but spreading all over Europe. But after our first official class with Jorge, the one where we got together in groups based on our DISC profiles - I realized it wasn’t going to be that simple. Or that easy. AT ALL. Possible? Maybe. But I’m just a graphic designer learning about management and business so from my perspective, it seemed impossible. I realized I had to keep it real and down to earth so eventually, my ambitious idea became smaller and much more reasonable.
I got together with Rodrigo and his idea was very similar to the whole student platform thing. And the idea started to shape up a bit. His idea revolved around furniture and solving home issues so after talking and analyzing, we realized we could work together. However, it wasn’t that simple. Our idea was still very ambitious and it wasn’t that original, either. After researching we found out there was a lot of competition out there. So we started to think about our ADDED VALUE. What would make our business different from everyone else? Andrea joined our group - being an interior designer we needed someone that knew about interior design.
After much brainstorming and design thinking, we came up with a brilliant idea of renting furniture. Rodrigo had to live an experience where he had to buy all his furniture because he found a great flat but it was unfurnished (still student housing problems, right?) and we took that experience and made it our own. We used the golden circle to develop our idea: WHY? WHAT? HOW? and we learned that the key was to start by asking ourselves why. Why do we care about this, at all?
This is just an idea, still. But we’re looking forward to developing it and make it happen.
Rodrigo:
Before starting working together, my inicial thought was: What's the first problem people have when they left their parents house? In my case I started reminding when my sister first moved to the U.S. for college, for her the main problem was when something in her apartment was damaged or broken or needs a repair. After 7 years, she still had this problem, even more because sometimes she just need a service to redecorate a room, later when I arrived in Barcelona, started having some issues with the apartment such as fixing the air conditioning, fixing the plugs, etc.So instead of asking your friends and family if they know someone for whatever job you need done (and there are some cases when you don't know anyone in a new city), the first thing I came up with was, a digital platform where you can enter and search near your area who deliver the service you need, instead of making several searches and taking hours, just one platform where you can find anything in the architectural, design, and construction area. Basically that was my first idea: a platform where people in most cases students, can find this kind of services quicker and easier. Giving the opportunity to new professionals and small companies to approach more clients. Then after talking with María, we realize that our projects had some similarities, helping people who just moved like us and a service that can make easier the way of living alone and not knowing much about these topics.We started talking more, brainstorming, giving shape to our project about how we can make this service better and what's the value we're delivering the users. I used to work doing interior design but for commercial spaces, such as restaurants and pop-up fairs, that's a little bit different from houses, we want to give people the experience of feeling good, cozy and at home even though they're probably on another country far from their families. Finally when the three of us brainstormed, we get to this final idea of renting/leasing furniture, this time I can relate even more to the problem, just when I arrived stayed with a friend for a week and started looking for apartments, of course I needed to share the flat with other people so I can avoid spending lost of money every month, so during this week I noticed that several of the apartments where unfurnished (not so expensive) and if not, they where just horrible and not in the conditions I wanted to live (and expensive), so after talking with my flatmates, came to the decision that we were renting unfurnished so we can buy all the furniture that we like and obviously affordable. After starting classes one of my roommates realize and told me that lost of people from his MBA class where doing the same thing as us, renting unfurnished. That's when Maria Andrea and me, thought this was an opportunity... Our final idea at that moment.
Andrea:
My initial project idea was the creation of an interior design company combined with the design of products such as lamps, furniture, and other kind products focused on interior design. The idea was to create a platform and a mobile application to offer custom designs that adapts to the needs of the clients. Therefore if the client wanted a furniture with special measures we could design it and make it on their own way. Also we could help the client to design the whole place with our knowledge. I understood that it was a big project to work alone in and I had to focus in one specific idea. I haven’t found the innovation part of the idea and that was another big problem.
After talking with María and Rodrigo, we realized that we could do our project together because the three of us where working on interior design ideas and we could combine our skills. We tried to link our ideas, but then we have seen that already existed a similar idea, so we began thinking in other kind of projects. We did brainstorming searching a better idea. We made a survey to see which one of the ideas we had was the best and more needed by students in other countries. At the end we chose the furniture leasing idea that we felt it closer because of our partner's experience Rodrigo. At that point we have found that there are many students like our friend, that are here in Barcelona just for a short period of time and don’t want to buy the furniture for one year. That’s why we are trying to make it simple for this people.
