Steve's Enterprising Ideas

I have 3 business Ideas that I am still finalizing. My first idea is entering the craft brewery business. Millennials, research has shown, have turned their backs on traditional American beers like Budweiser and Miller Lite. One walk along the beer isle in any supermarket attests to this fact. Traditional beer brands have been forced to make room and share the isle with many beer brands unheard of just ten years ago. The Budweiser Clydesdales just got laid off last year. The NASCAR dad image is no longer relevant or appealing to young people today. My idea for a locally brewed craft beer to capture this emerging and rapidly growing market couldn't have been timed better. Startup costs are relatively low for craft beer brewery. There are numerous website that hawk start up kits. To get my product on the market I would need to link up with local bars and restaurants. Beer drinkers these days are more than willing to try new things. My other Idea for business is creating a video game that recreates and re-imagines epic battles fought centuries ago. Battles like Trafalgar, Antietam, the Battle of Vienna, Napoleon's disaster in Moscow, Waterloo etc. Costs for developing video games aren't that expensive. Most of the costs go to paying salaries for programmers and for specialized computer equipment. My final business idea is running a mobile food truck. These food trucks seem to be all the rage these days. Because competition in that industry is getting tight, my idea will involve a gimmick to make it stand out from the crowd. I could combine three or more ethnic themes, serve rotating rare esoteric dishes, and utilize edgy guerilla marketing tactics. Of course, most of my ideas, even potential brand names and logos, aren’t fully original. Nothing is these days.

I had never watched or even heard of this movie before. I had always thought Office Space was the only movie that captured the essence of the dot.com boom-bust era. These movie, unlike Office Space, shows us what was really going on in the back rooms of those companies which emerged overnight, were valued in billions, and then disappeared without a trace. While Office Space had better camera, lighting, and Jennifer Aniston, Startup.com was real. The documentary film follows the then e-commerce website govWorks and its founders Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman from 1999-2000 as they try to make their company successful amid an economy that had fallen out of love with internet start=up companies. Like in all business start-ups the founders took great risks when they left steady jobs with well paying companies like Goldman Sachs for the high risk high reward dot.com. In the end, they, like most entrepreneurs failed. Their friend who was least committed, and bailed out earliest got the most out of it.They were victims of timing and too much competition. Since the late 1990's, most court costs are indeed paid online just like Herman and Tuzman predicted. Every local court website in America accepts credit cards these days. Both of them gained a lot of experience and life lessons. They experienced the highest of highs and lowest of lows. Kaleil go to rub shoulders with President Clinton and even slipped him a business card. Their friend who profited most from the venture, probably learnt the wrong life lesson from the whole ordeal. He may have come to view business ventures as mere pump and dump outfits.

Like everyone else who has had a job and worked under other people; i would prefer, in a perfect situation, to be my own boss. I want to have the privilege to make my own decisions, and succeed or fail own my own accord. It's is after all the, American dream.There are a lot of classes at the UW that teach how to build things or sell things, but in this class i expect to learn the process of setting up things to enable one to build and sell things.I expect from this course to learn and develop a step by step process of developing a business. From the inception of an idea to all the steps needed to bring that idea into the marketplace.