For this week, Jiaqi and I were tasked with searching for potential micro mom influencers we could gift a box to help promote our product and Instagram page. To search for information on these influencers, I used Instagram, Social Blade and a few smaller websites and blogs. Unfortunately, most of the micro mom influencers with a sizeable following that I managed to find had children over our desired age range of 1-2-year-olds. Some takeaways that I had regarding Singaporean mom influencers is that most tend to have low engagement rates on posts featuring their children. However, many of them have a considerable % of low-grade followers - something I searched up, considering it is easy to buy Instagram followers and likes. From the influencers I searched up, my top 2 picks were Nursyazanna Syaira and Diah Mastura.

Our business plan has changed quite a bit after getting advice from Mr Roderick and experts in the field. Unfortunately, the initial market survey we did - as unhelpful as the responses were - wouldn't apply particularly to the current product. Sadly, it just crossed my mind that we should have created another market survey around our current business plan and product before we started selling. It would have helped us with the pricing issue.

After some discussion, the most popular pricing seems to sell the current batch at $46 - after a 22% 'opening soon in 2022' discount - with the boxes' actual pricing being $59 per box.

We came together on zoom to register as an LLP in BizFile+. There was some talk of opening a business account for Little Dipper.

We also did market research this week to finalise which country to focus on. We wanted to focus on countries near or close to Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. From the Market Research I did, I wanted to focus on Singapore and Indonesia. Indonesia has many first-time millennial parents who are willing to pay more for aesthetically pleasing baby items. They also have separate online shopping platforms dedicated purely to selling baby and toddler necessities. Based on a survey conducted, Indonesian parents prefer to buy baby items online. All these factors would make it easier for us to target and sell our products. A significant issue, however, is the language barrier - we will have to commission a translator. While Indonesia is an outstanding market to target, I'd prefer to start the business in Singapore first as its familiar grounds. We already have some knowledge and connections that would help us navigate the market better. During the meeting to finalise the target market, it was evident that all 5 of us wanted to focus on Singapore, so after contacting Mr Roderick, we decided to stick to Singapore.

After that, we came together to create the questionnaire for the parents and edit Nandika's draft for the KOLs, and we sent it out to anyone parents we knew of and the KOLs we'd searched up. Unfortunately for use, by the end of the week, non of the KOLs replied back to us and we started to panic a bit. Nandika and Grace we on to use the contacts they had within the early childhood industry.

We met several times this week to discuss our business plan and get started on our business report and presentation site. We delegated different parts of the report and presentation to each other. My delegated part was on market analysis. I was honestly surprised that first-order births accounted for almost half of all births. Porter's five forces showed us that our idea had some potential, and it pushed us on to keep going.

As we discussed our business proposal, the only disagreement I had was on the expansion strategies. Expanding to other countries is an anticipated expansion strategy; however, I feel we should also try to retain our current customers rather than just trying to reach out to more and more customers. By the end of our proposed subscription boxes, the children will be around 24 months, so I feel we should capitalise on that by providing a curated children's book subscription to help parents encourage their kids to learn how to read and articulate. Unfortunately, during our discussions, I could not adequately explain my idea for our potential expansion strategies to my teammates, and they vetoed the idea. This has shown me that I've got to be less hesitant, not back down so fast and think of the best way to share my ideas and thoughts clearly and precisely so that my teammates can understand and visualise what I'm sharing - this way, there will be more meaningful discussions.

This was the start of our entrepreneurship journey. First, we had to pitch our ideas to Mr Roderick. Everyone had contributed, and we had a few ideas that we thought could work. We were not expecting, however, for Mr Roderick to reject all of them for various reasons - being too labor intensive, not being feasible, short time frame to execute, inventory heavy and not designing and producing a new product. However, in the end, Mr Roderick approved Nandika's business proposal.

The business proposal I'd come up with was an all-in-one website to compare furniture, like a Trivago for furniture. There is a lot of small furniture and home decoration businesses littered all around Singapore. Unfortunately, not all of them have the best visibility online, and some are located in rather ulu places in Singapore. This makes it hard to compare furniture available island-wide for cost-effectiveness or specific patterns and colours. The website would allow small businesses to stand on the same foothold as more established brands like Ikea and Courts. We could earn a small commission for each user redirected to the furniture business's website and ad revenue. This business proposal came about as I'd found it annoying and time-consuming to search for furniture shops and compare their prices and models, but we weren't quite sure how many people in Singapore would need or want such a service.

There were many ideas proposed but the proposals I was really interested in were Nandika's and Usman's.

Nadika's business proposal was to have a subscription-based service to deliver boxes with toys necessary to develop babies motor skills. I really liked that proposal, but after some discussion, the consensus that we came to was that we didn't have the credibility to gain the parent's trust. So it's a relief that Nadika took the chance and pitched her proposal to Mr Roderick as it gave us the push needed to find a good KOL and make her proposal a reality.

Usman's idea was to produce bike frames and tiers with a new material called Liquid metal. Making bicycles with this material would make them lighter and more durable than those made with stainless steel, and much cheaper. The plan was to purchase the material and send it to a manufacturer. Once the bicycles parts were produced, they would be shipped to Singapore where we would assemble them and sell them. His other idea was EGaln electronics. He proposed we use this material to make cables that are more durable and can repair itself if broken. Unfortunately Mr Roderick rejected this idea as we don't have time and manpower to do new product design, make prototypes, test them out and redesign before selling the final product.

Other than the idea generation, we faced an issue with team formation. We had already formed a team before ET9135's first class started and I believe we went in with the notion that all of us would be working together for our future business. We knew of only one other group for our batch and were unaware that students from the other batches were joining us. So when the class started, Nigel's group took in the other two students from the previous batches and we thought that was that. Unfortunately that was not the case and more students came in on week 2. In the end, it culminated in us choosing our groups again and forming 3 groups instead.