The Idea

From the start of this module all the way until few days before the submission of our business plan, our group were quite indecisive on which business idea we should go with. The options we had were: dried floral based products, laptop stickers, breakfast stand, and electronic digital marketing. Members were defending their own ideas (quite fiercely I might add), trying to convince everyone else that all the problems with their idea can be ironed out easily.

There are a few pointers about this that I feel are relevant.

Firstly, we are all undergraduates with no experience, no expertise and very little capital. The previous few modules of MIE, to be honest, are all quite theoretical and probably isn't likely to help us a lot. As such, any idea is going to sound viable to some extent but be equally hard to execute (we definitely have to put in effort to learn the relevant craft), unless one has experience with the craft already.

Secondly, every member should agree with the viability of an idea before proceeding. While arguing about ideas is a tiring and frustrating process , it is also very necessary, because if a consensus cannot be reached at such an early stage, there will likely be worse conflicts in the future. Together with the first point, maybe it doesn't matter too much which idea we choose, as long as everyone agrees and there are no glaring problems with the idea.

Lastly, this is something I personally feel. In the end, ET 9135 is a module set up to gives us as much exposure to the nitty-gritty difficulties of raising a start-up. It can be said that the nature of this module is to make it difficult, or else it will be meaningless. As such, do not be afraid to choose a difficult business to do, as the effort put in is proportional to the takeaway at least in this module. In fact, we might as well choose something we have no experience in.

In the end, we felt that the dried flowers is the best option, as it is 1. quite interesting to all of us, 2. something we have never done before and 3. feasible enough to us.