Grace

Week 0

First Lesson | Idea Generation

[25 Sept 2021]

Today marks the first day we met as a class. We started forming our groups and thinking about the possible entrepreneurial ventures we can go into.

I had done some idea generation on my own and thus, proposed them to my group.

One of my ideas was an online gift box business. We could package selected items into gift boxes, and customers could purchase them for special occasions such as birthdays, farewells, anniversary etc to bless their loved ones. We could offer some standardised gift boxes and some personalised ones by allowing customers to pick and choose from a list of items to include in their boxes. Aesthetics and design of the box can be personalised too. We would sell customers convenience and personalised gifts.

However, Mr Roderick's advice to us is that we have to consider inventory and storage problems due to our large inventory. I had also neglected that this would imply a high start-up cost in order to launch this business, and may eat into our profit margins as we also had to price our gift boxes at a reasonable price. Relationships with our suppliers have to be established to be able to get competitive prices when obtaining our products.

I realised that there were many things I failed to consider in evaluating the feasibility of my business idea, and would have to learn to not only see the big picture, but also to consider the details of many aspects in a business.

We went on to discuss many other ideas such as a headshot photography business, a Go Pro renting business, and even an accreditation tool for employers. Yet, after conducting a feasibility analysis on each of these ideas, we found them impractical or lacking areas for growth.

Class was about to end, but we are still at our wits' end. I then came up with another suggestion, which is to join the team of another business and revamp its operation and marketing strategies. A friend, whom the rest of my group are acquainted with, and I had started a cold brew business not long ago. We would be more than happy to have my group come aboard the team to operate and grow this business.

Yet, we had not sufficiently thought through how we would proceed with the venture, and the goals we would set for the progress of the business. Overly focused on its feasibility for the short period of 6 months, we had limited ourselves to expansion in universities. Moreover, we had failed to foresee storage issues for the cooling of the drinks, the high marketing costs required to educate customers about cold brew, as well as large amounts of manual manpower required, which would be taxing on us. As Mr Roderick rightly pointed out, as university students, we have the capability to better utilise our skills in higher-skilled work instead of manual labour. He also suggested that we think of our vision for our proposed ventures before deciding on the ideas. For example, would our target be putting our cold brew on the shelves of supermarket, setting up stores across Singapore, or expanding to overseas markets? He then went on to explain the difference between an entrepreneurial venture and a business.

I begin to see that difference in the mindset of a businessman and an entrepreneur. Our entrepreneurial venture should not be just a repetition of businesses done before, but should carry a certain level of innovation and novelty. We should aim far but also ensure its scalability for feasible execution in our 6 months of implementation. Coming up with a solid idea was a challenge. We decided that we would go back to generate more ideas, and come back together later in the week to discuss the ideas before the next lesson.

Week 1

Idea Generation | Groupings

[26 Sept 2021 - 2 Oct 2021]

We met twice this week again to discuss our ideas. Our group managed to throw out quite a few ideas for consideration. Our discussion sessions were pretty eye-opening. As a team, we managed to give a more well-rounded feasibility analysis of each idea as by putting our heads together, we were able to consider more aspects of the business (market demand, supply chain, inventory storage, cost efficiency etc) and minimise leaving out important details, which was an improvement from our previous idea generation session in class.

We expounded on the cold brew business idea once again, with Mr Roderick's feedback in mind. We envisioned that the cold brew business could expand from NTU to pop-up stores and then having it on the shelves of supermarkets as well. To have a Unique Selling Point, I suggest that we could field test new and possibly "whacky" flavours in NTU and other universities for a start, and once we found our most popular flavour, we could make it into our signature drink. Although this provides us with a differentiating factor, my group concluded that we did not have the infrastructure, competitive advantage or experience as of now to implement this idea. We thus moved on to other ideas.

Notably, we also explored other innovative ideas, such as the using the new material E Galn for electronic applications, and a new titanium material to make bicycles. I expressed my concern that it may be difficult to acquire those novel materials at a low price, and hence it may not be cost efficient for us to embark on this venture.

Even after coming up with so many ideas, my group have not found an idea where we all agreed would be feasible and where each of us has the interest to invest in.

In class, one of my groupmates pitched her idea of developmental playboxes for early childhood (ages 0-2). We would package items into these playboxes, and parents could purchase these boxes (perhaps through a subscription model), saving them time from sourcing each individual toy or resource on their own. This is especially helpful for first time parents who are not sure what to expect or give their toddlers to encourage them to learn.

The idea seemed feasible and was supported by all our groupmates. Mr Roderick also had positive feedback on this idea, and encouraged us to leverage Singapore's renown education brand name to promote our playboxes overseas as well. Although I foresee that there are still quite a lot of details to iron out, I believe that this idea has great potential. My main concerns would be our inventory as well as how we are going to obtain enough credibility to assure customers of quality products.

After confirming groupings, we decided to meet again in the week to sort out our entrepreneurial venture details.

Week 2-3

Ironing out details | Business Plan Preparation

[3 Oct 2021 - 16 Oct 2021]

Immediately after confirming on our venture idea, I spurred into action. I remembered that one of my church members is in the early childhood sector, and approached her via text to seek her advice. As my group had just came up with the idea, I asked her for some pointers for our research and early childhood developmental products that we could look out for. As a certified preschool teacher, she was able to direct me to some credible resources about early childhood developments and milestones, which I quickly relayed to my group. These resources are used by early childhood educators in Singapore, and helped us greatly in our initial research. After my group did our research and came up with a list of proposed items for each age group, I approached her to check if they were suitable. With her experience with young toddlers, she was able to suggest two more possible developmental toys to include in our playboxes that can help in sensorial exploration and motor skills.

Later in the week, I approached her if she would be able to act as one of our Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). To our delight, she agreed! We found our first KOL, Fedore! I would be the point of contact to facilitate communications between her and my group.

In preparation for the business plan report and presentation, my group decided to do our individual research in Week 2, reconvene near the end of Week 2 to consolidate our findings and dedicate work. We would then come back at the start of Week 3 to finalise our business plan, and start working on our website for the presentation.

I researched on the developmental milestones that the toddler should achieve at each developmental stage, starting from birth to 2 years old. With the help of the credible websites I found, I paired each developmental goals to with one or 2 toys, placing a special focus on sensorial exploration and other developmental goals as recommended by the online resources our first KOL had passed us.

I also looked into some competitors that we have, such as Squizzel Box and Eillefun Box, and found out that Squizzle Box had a very similar model to us, albeit their target age group is 3 and above, while we are targetting from birth to 24 months. However, my finding enabled us to realise that competitors may not only be from new or existing entrants in the 0-2 years market, but also may be from existing companies that are expanding into our target market. In fact, it may be easier for them to do so as they already have infrastructure and customer base in place, as well as more prominent brand presence. We would have to find our USP to compete with them in for market share. We decided that credibility and support from KOLs from recognised institutions would be our strong point, and work towards making that our advantage over other existing companies.

When we met to consolidate our research, we firmed up the products that we wanted to include, and I relayed the list to our first KOL, Fedore, to vet. She feedbacked that we were heading in the right direction! (And gave us a few more suggestions as mentioned.)

I was dedicated the role of Chief Marketing Officer for our company. For our report and website, I was in charge of the Operational Plan, including the write up of our management team. As a team, we had decided to create our own website as our main sales channel. To come up with our marketing strategies and expansion strategies, I had to conduct quite a lot of research on Search Engine Marketing and other possible sale channels we can leverage. Yet, it was exciting to learn more about digital marketing and envision how my team would be implementing it in the future. For myself, I am looking forward to trying out digital marketing in real life after learning about it. I also came up with the idea of having an Instagram account too, as well as explicitly detailing what our revenue and cost entails. Furthermore, I researched on potential KOLs and ethical, sustainable and safety requirements to complete the rest of the operational plan. It was very fulfilling to have been a key contributor in planning our venture's execution plan as by explicitly writing out our implementation plan in black and white, we have a clearer idea on what we are embarking on, and it brings us one step closer to the actual implementation of our venture.

Digital Marketing

We also discussed to pick a name for our company. After the suggestion Little Dipper was put forth, I supported it with a quick research on the constellation, and was pleased to find that the brightest star of Little Dipper, Polaris, aids in navigation. I believe that this would be very apt for our company and what we are doing as we want to help toddlers navigate their way in their learning and development! Little Dipper was thus chosen as our company name.

After many drafts, we voted and picked our finalised logo and banner! We are all very proud of it as we each had a small part in it, be it the colour scheme, font or design. (Credits to Jia Qi, Kerriane, and Danesha for the main bulk of the designs!)

Brand Name and Logo

Banner

Week 4

Market Research | Suppliers | KOLs | Market Research Questionnaire | Team Blog

[17 Oct 2021 - 23 Oct 2021]

After hearing Mr Roderick's feedback to consider targeting overseas countries straightaway instead of waiting till expansion phase, my team had decided to do market research on a few overseas countries, namely Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, before selecting 2-3 countries to target. I researched on the social and economic sides of ASEAN countries, but found that none presents more opportunities than the other countries. They all have relatively weaker currency than Singapore, rendering our goods costly to them. Socially, although they are in close proximity to Singapore and know of Singapore's highly regarded education brand, none stood out more than the others in terms of desiring early childhood materials from Singapore. We were troubled as none of the countries seemed to offer a promising market, and felt stuck. On behalf of my group, I wrote to Mr Roderick for advice on this problem. He advised that we consider who would be our potential customers, and how we are to reach out to them. In the end, after much consideration, my group made the decision that we will still stick to targeting Singapore's market as per our original plan before expanding overseas, and leverage our personal connections and accessibility to Singapore parent groups to kick off our entrepreneurship venture.

My group made a google sheets to track and record online supplier contacts. However, as we searched, we realised that majority of the online suppliers require a large Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ). Moreover, they had long shipment time and their products are not certified for safe baby use. Prioritising quality, certified brand and reliability, we decided that we will source our products from local wholesale toy sellers instead. This is so that we can review and carefully select reliable and certified toys, as well as have a shorter delivery time. We would also have more control over the number of orders we would want to purchase. I searched up potential wholesale suppliers that we can look into, and recorded their contacts in our google sheets. My whole team would then go down to these stores in the next few weeks to check them out, and select toys according to our KOLs' advice.

Kerriane and I sent out emails to the different KOLs. I emailed 7 KOLs from the National Institute of Education (NIE), while Kerriane was assigned to email the potential KOLs from the National Institute of Early Childhood Development (NIEC). However, after a week, we did not obtain any answers, save for one kind professor who replied even though she dappled with some early childhood development aspects, it is not exactly her field, and directed us to email other personnel. Thus, I suggested that I could contact our only current KOL, Fedore, (whom I had contacted previously) to see if she can link us up with her previous NIEC professors, or other professionals in the Early Childhood industry. She kindly agreed to help us out, and said to give her about 1 week to contact the experts she knows.

My group also created our Market Research Questionnaire together at the end of our meeting. We came up with the questions to ask, as well as the range of options we would be giving. I gave inputs and suggestions as well, such as deciding the income range of the parents, logical order of questions, and structuring the phrasing of sentences, amongst others. We are to send out this survey to family and friends and encourage them to continue the chain and get more responses.

I was also in charge of writing the team blog this week!

Week 5

Website Outsourcing | KOLs | Market Research Questionnaire | Early Childhood Developmental Milestones

[24 Oct 2021 - 31 Oct 2021]

Website Outsourcing

As my group has decided to outsource the development of our website to free up time for ourselves to do marketing and outreach, I was placed in charge with contacting a acquaintance of mine who had experience in website development, and discuss the possibility of building a website for us and to ask for a quotation.

I made an appointment with him on 24th October, and he was of a great help. With his experience with web development, he could flash out points that we missed out, and gave us some points to consider.

I first explained to him what is Little Dipper about and our requirements for website, which is having a page to list our products (the different playboxes with a few toys each), a page to checkout the items, and a query form.

We then discussed to come with a rough outline of the website, as shown in the photo, with some potential add-ons to attach to the website, such as Formspree for our query form, and Stripe for checkout and payments. All these are decided with cost consideration (either free or within budget) and scalability (able to cover the scope we need now, and expandable in the future). We even explored domain names, picking out potential domain names within a suitable price range, such as littledipperplayboxes.com, which is around $3 for the first year.

Other questions we need to consider include:

Delivery service. We had to settle on our delivery company so that we can do the tracking of packages in our website, or link up the tracking with our client's email. A potential devliery service we can look into is Ninja Van for local deliveries.
Account or checkout details. I would have to discuss with my group what format we would want our wesite to have: login account or no account but just have to input details when checking out the goods. We would also have to think of how our clients can track their orders, and reassure them that their orders are received and sent (perhaps by email confirmation).
The content my group would want to display on the home page (landing page) and about page.

Potential payment or costs include:

Payment site (suggested: Stripe), which can link to WISE
Contact us (query site): we can choose a free API, or more advanced features up to %50 a month. The suggested site is using Formspree (50 queries per month for free, and expandable in the future with monthly subscription of $8 for 500 queries per month).
Domain name (goDaddy or NameCheap): Different domain name will have different price - my group can think abt customer perception when they see the domain name to decide on our final domain name.
My friend has kindly offered us to do develop the website for free as we are just starting out our entrepreneurship venture.

Other suggestions include:

We can intentionally input words related to baby, infants and toddlers on our webpage, include more links at the end of our page, or consider blogging on our website to improve our SEO.
Other ways to promote our website include utilising the Instagram platform, or engaging micro-influencers.

After nailing down all these details, he would be able to give us a mock up of the website in 2 weeks time from whenever we give him the green light to start.

A week after I had approached our KOL, Fedore, to help link us up with other potential KOLs, I contacted her again for updates, to ask if she had successfully reached out to more experts in the Early Childhood sector. However, as she was caught up with work the previous week, she has yet to contact other professionals in the field. To help her out, I drafted a message for her to send out to her contacts, explaining our entrepreneurship venture, what we do in Little Dipper, and ending with an appeal to them to come onboard as a KOL. We hope that we will receive responses in the next week.

After a week of launching our Market Research Questionnaire, we managed to receive 25 responses. This is around a quarter of our target number of responses. Moreover, out of these responses, only 2 are parents. To achieve our target number, and especially to reach out to parents, we thought of sending our forms to Singapore parent groups, such as Facebook support groups. Personally, I would be sending the form out to more family and friends, especially first time parents, to get more responses from our main target group.

We managed to get another potential KOL, Ms Angela Anthony, who seem to be willing to advice us on the suitability of toys we have. We are to have a call with her in the next 2 weeks. Before that, she had requested us to draw out more concrete developmental milestones we would like to achieve for each age group, such as the exact motor or sensorial skill. I would research more into it and explicitly match each developmental goal to the toys and tools we have, and record them down in our product google sheets.

Week 6

Website | KOLs

[31 Oct 2021 - 6 Nov 2021]

During our internal group meeting on the 30th of October, my group raised some concerns on creating our own website, and suggested that we could leverage the e-commerce platform, Shopify. There was a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages on using Shopify versus creating our own website from scratch. Initially, sides were divided. I felt that creating our own website would be quite cool, and we would be able to have full control over its design and available features. Furthermore, we have my friend to help us build the website from scratch, free-of-charge. On the other hand, I acknowledged that there could be website maintenance problems in the future when we continue our entrepreneurship venture beyond the Minor in Entrepreneurship, as we do not possess the necessary skills to continue developing the website. Shopify, with its comprehensive features and seamless transaction process, would thus enable us to easily learn and build the website. We would be able to reap benefits from its provided features as well. To get opinions from a more experienced website developer, I turned to my friend again for his thoughts, and my group eagerly awaited his advice. I discussed more about the pros and cons with him, and sought his advice pertaining to choosing a suitable type of website for our entrepreneurship venture.

The main points we discussed can be summarised as shown below:

Shopify:

Own Website:

In the end, my group decided to go ahead with the Shopify website as it already has all the features we wanted, and is easier to maintain by ourselves. Shopify would fit our entrepreneurship venture better.

I also managed to contact another KOL through Fedore. After checking in with Fedore again, she replied that one of her profs, Ms Belinda, had replied and expressed interest! She passed me her phone number for me to contact directly. I further explained our business idea to her, and spelled out the overview of her roles as a KOL should she agree to partner with us. To our delight, she was keen to be our KOL and assist us in ensuring that our key milestones, products and educational instructions are suitable for the infants at the respective ages. I would also continue to be the point of contact for this KOL.

Week 7

KOL Meeting | Refining Key Milestones

[7 Nov 2021 - 13 Nov 2021]

We had a group meeting with the KOL contacted by Nandika, Ms Angela Anthony. I took down the minutes for the meeting, and asked questions whenever necessary.

She encouraged us to not be too fixated by the milestones, as they are not individual goals to achieve at a certain age, but are there to guide us to know what kind of products to include in the playboxes.

She believes that the 3 main points that we should focus on are how to communicate the activities to the parents, the choice of activities, and the choice of resources. She also went through with us the main developmental points of infants (0-10 months) and toddlers (10 months to 3 years).

Afterwards, my group decided to pick out 5-6 milestones from our list for each category (motor, sensory, communication, social emotional, cognitive, etc) under each age group. This is so that we can narrow down our focus and carefully select our resources and activities afterwards.

I was in charge of selecting the specific milestones for ages 0-6 months.

I sifted through the list of milestones, distinguishing the ones that are achievable by toys and play, and adding them to our refined list. Some examples include moving fist from close to open, which can be achieved by playing with soft toys or squishable balls, as well as using both hands to explore toys, which can be achieved by sensorial toys to encourage touch.

We had a group meeting to consolidate our refined milestones, and also create our Facebook page. There were many hiccups while attempting to create it, as some of us, including me, had our Facebook pages blocked when creating the business page due to reasons Facebook cited as "security". However, Kerriane managed to get it set up in the end.

Week 8

KOL Meeting | Approaches to Consider

[14 Nov 2021 - 20 Nov 2021]

This week we had another KOL meeting. This time, it was with a KOL that Kerriane had managed to contact - Ms Shaireen.

We gave her a run through of our venture, as well as showed her our refined list of key milestones for each playbox.

To our pleasant surprise, Ms Shaireen was very enthusiastic about our ideas, and dived into sharing with us more about the approaches that we could take. Again, I took charge of the minutes, recorded the pointers, distinguished and highlighted critical points to be discussed by my group after.

One of the most insightful points was her business ideas to sell our playboxes to infant care teachers instead of directly to parents. This is to provide a convenient solution for infant care teachers who may not have the expertise to develop or know which educational resources to use. We can also replace the toys with more DIY activities so that our box is affordable enough to sell in masses to infant cares.

Another significant suggestion we adopted was to have our instructions and play suggestions in short videos instead of writing it all out in words in our instruction booklet. This would not only be simple and concise for easy understanding, but also interactive and engaging for the parents.

I realised that putting the playbox together is not a piece of cake. There are so many factors to consider (social, economic, marketing, ethical etc) when just choosing the items or activities. We may also take a longer time to put a comprehensive box together, which includes products, resources, and educational instruction, leading to a tighter schedule for marketing activities. Yet, I believe that my team works well together and will support one another to overcome obstacles met in the process.

Week 9 - 10

Supplier Sourcing | Schedule KOL Meeting | Group Consult | Group Meeting | Team Blog

[21 Nov 2021 - 4 Dec 2021]

In Week 9, we were all having finals, and hence put a temporary halt on Little Dipper's activities.

In Week 10 however, we fully resumed our activities, starting with a recce to 4 toy warehouses in Singapore in search of potential suppliers for our products. They are: Toy Tag, Tai Sing, Sintat Toys, and T for Toys. These warehouses were previously searched up by Nandika and I, and Kerriane called them up the day before we visited to notify them of our coming visit.

A problem we saw was that the really good quality toys were extremely expensive, as they are considered premium products and appropriately priced as such. For example, Toy Tag had many creative and unique toys that are of superb quality. But we could not include them in our playboxes unless we are prepared to charge a premium price for them as well. Our marketing and unique selling point will also have to differ from our initial approach. Thus, we discussed and agreed that we have to make a compromise and acquire toys that are affordable and of acceptable quality.

I specially looked out for those that can have many purposes - toys that can be utilised in different types of play, so that parents can creatively engage their children with the toy in more than 1 way. Parents can also increase the level of difficulty and complexity as their child grows throughout the 6 months while using our boxes. I proposed that we can suggest different forms of engagement in our instruction videos.

I also put forward Ms Shaireen’s suggestion of using more DIY activities and household items to lower costs. Moreover, we can value add by teaching parents how to use them to their advantage as tools for development, through our instruction videos. Some products/activities I suggested were frozen pom pom exploration, and threading. These would train motor skills, and double up for education of colours and other concepts of textures and temperature. Afterall, pom poms and thread are affordable and commonplace.

After visiting all 4 warehouses, we sat down to nail down the products for each of our 3 playboxes, taking care to hit as many developmental milestones as we could. We also considered cheaper alternatives from Shopee.

My group also planned out our schedule for the coming December and part of January, and I also contacted Ms Belinda and Fedore for a meeting to check our products. This is so that we can order the products during the 12/12 sale. I successfully set up a meeting with both of them on 7 December to check the suitability of our products and ask for advice/opinions on DIY activities.

We had our group consult on Saturday. I took minutes, and explained our ideas to the instructors (Mr Roderick and Mr Adrian) when needed. I also asked questions, hoping to hear their opinion on our plans. I wanted to focus more on the marketing aspect as well, as none of us have experience with marketing, especially digital marketing. I foresee some challenges ahead in the marketing aspect, and look forward to taking steps to learn more and finding out ways to equip ourselves with the necessary skills to conduct marketing for our LLP. I believe that this is a crucial part of our project, and the most difficult challenge. Our marketing plan could be a make or break for our sales. Perhaps the other challenge that is of equal difficulty is putting together a credible playbox with high quality - seeking professionals and making decisions to input the most suitable products and educational instructions is no easy feat.

A crucial point to note is that we decided to correct our reference to the early childhood professionals from “KOL” to “experts”, and decided to call the influencers that we hope to engage in our marketing strategy as “influencers”. This is because while discussing our marketing plans, Mr Adrian had let us know that “KOL'' in marketing terminology refers to the highest level influencer. We thus decided that to reduce confusion, we should change our reference terms.

In the subsequent group meeting after the consult, my group nailed down the exact product models we would be ordering, and prepared for the purchase of products. We had a lot to discuss, including Ms Shaireen’s suggestions and pointers from our Group Consult. In the meeting, I put forth some key suggestions that pivoted group decisions and moved discussion forward. These include my proposal that we select a playbox to focus on, and target putting together 10 boxes of that playbox in our initial stage to test public traction. It would act as our R&D testing batch. This would solve our logistic problem while we sort out a more permanent solution for the future, and would also be a more realistic and practical aim for us during this module. We agreed that we should choose the playbox for ages 1-2 as during this stage, the development in the infant is more “seeable” and we would be able to track the success of our playox’s products. We would aim to sell these 10 boxes in the time span of our module, but knowing that we are a new LLP, there is not much brand awareness and we may have to do a giveaway instead for people to try our boxes and give testimonials/feedback, as advised by Mr Adrian. However, we also aim to reserve at least 3 playboxes to sell/giveaway to potential customers who message us to get to know more about our playboxes. We hope to acquire these customers through our marketing, to see if our outreach is indeed successful (and not by relations only).

Lastly, it was my turn to write the team blog again, and I recorded our week’s activities and progress in detail.

Group picture: our team enjoying working together

Week 11

Meeting w Fedore | Meeting w Shai + Group Consolidation | Meeting w Belinda | Purchasing Products

[5 Dec 2021 - 11 Dec 2021]

On Tuesday, my group got onto a group call as I had scheduled a meeting with 2 of our experts - Fedore and Ms Belinda. What we did not foresee was that Ms Belinda did not show up, or reply to my attempts to contact her. We made the call to proceed with the meeting despite this set back. I started the ball rolling by facilitating the group discussion to ease my group and Fedore into discussion.

Fedore vetted our developmental milestones, and feedbacked that we are on track - the milestones are accurate to the respective age groups. As for our chosen products for ages 1-2, Fedore advised that we could focus on products that can lead to activities that promote parent-child bonding. She was also very helpful with DIY activities, suggesting make-it-yourself edible playdoh, and sensorial/exploration activities like threading, simple artwork (hand painting on toilet rolls). She also gave us the idea of a thematic box, such as having all the activities related to The Hungry Caterpillar, a famous book for children. We found that we could include many of her suggestions and made the necessary changes for our box.

Only after the meeting did Ms Belinda reply to me through text. She apologised to us that she had a small medical hiccup and thus was unable to attend the meeting. She was kind enough to offer to meet us another time. I quickly discussed with my team and got several possible dates to meet with Ms Belinda on Zoom. I then worked with Ms Belinda’s schedule to set up another meeting with her. It was scheduled for Friday.

On Thursday, we had a meeting with Ms Shaireen. She suggested that if we were going to go with thematic boxes, we should consider increasing the frequency of our boxes to keep up with the development of the child. However, in our internal meeting, I pointed out that it was not feasible right now in our initial stage to have so many boxes in stock. We would have to increase our stock on products tremendously, and our costs would skyrocket as well.

Ms Belinda gave similar feedback to Fedore, and refined some products that Fedore pointed out to us. One example is the Oobleck (cornstarch), which is a similar concept to Fedore’s make-it-yourself edible playdoh, and we included that in our box instead as it is easier to make and obtain than the edible playdoh. Ms Belinda also gave us tips to know how to look out for safety of infant products, such as getting certificates from shops. She also advised us to have enough funds - "emergency funds" as she calls it - in case of anything. We would be able to fall back on those funds if we need. These helped me to increase consciousness on the many different aspects we have to consider before taking more steps into any ventures.

Even though my group had many great propositions by our experts, there is no rose without a thorn. It is impossible to follow all the many different opinions from the experts at once. Our group had to discern which advice we were going to heed, and which ones were contradictory to our mission and goals. I wanted to challenge myself and played a pivotal role in accessing which suggestion to take. For example, I reasoned that Ms Shai's suggestion of sending boxes monthly instead of our current 6 month interval to give the toddlers new books every month is not practical for us to carry out now while we are in our testing stage. Furthermore, it is not our goal to provide every educational need for the child, but to introduce resources and activities that parents can use to help developmental growth. Thus, there was no need to provide boxes monthly, and our toys could be used over the 6 months with different activities of increasing advancement. My team agreed, and we stuck to our original plan of providing boxes for every 6 months.

In our own group meeting, we threw around ideas, trying to decide the best items for the box. We gave each other feedback and suggestions, commenting on the products and factoring in considerations such as costs, quality, and usability. Even after we had decided on the exact item, we used the same concepts to nail down the exact model we are looking for. After finalising the box’s products, we proceeded to buy them from Shopee. We had managed to find cheaper alternatives from Shopee to save costs. We also bought tissue paper for packaging, and looked at options for boxes (sizing, colour, etc), amongst other miscellaneous items such as tape.

Week 12 - 13

Purchase Materials | Product Video and Marketing Plan, Instruction Booklet | Purchase of Playboxes | Storyboarding

[12 Dec 2021 - 25 Dec 2021]

On Friday (17 Dec), my group went out to purchase materials for the packaging inside the box. This is so that we will be well prepared and ready to repackage our products and put together the playboxes once our products arrive. While waiting for our products to be delivered, it is best that we make use of this waiting period to do other productive things that we could.

We went to Daiso to purchase containers for repackaging our products bougght in bulk, such as bristle blocks, pom poms and kinetic sand. We were met with the difficulty of high prices, which translates to high costs, as aesthetically pleasing containers were naturally more expensive. I reasoned that the cheaper alternatives were still presentable and customers would not notice the differences in packaging had we chosen the more expensive boxes. It was not essential that we provide packaging of such high quality, which would only increase our costs unproportionately to the slight increase in appeal. After some discussion, my team took a vote and we decided to go with the cheaper, but still presentable and professional, boxes. We also bought design materials, such as paint, which we planned to design the boxes with. We hope that our box design would not only be aesthetically pleasing but also unique!

Before purchasing the materials, we also sat down to discuss our product video and marketing plans, working out how we wanted them to be carried out. We would ask Jia Qi’s cousins details for the filming, such as availability in their schedule, if it was alright to film in their house, as well as privacy issues such as filming of faces and credit details. We also decided that for the product videos, it would be a maximum of 30s to keep them bite size and we would plan out the angles, actions and flow of the videos through storyboarding to allow us to know how to film them.

However, for the marketing plan, we were still unsure how to proceed as there are many unknowns currently. We only decided that we would use clips from the product videos to form the marketing video. We will still have to work on deciding on a more concrete marketing plan in future meetings.

We also planned out the design and layout of our instruction booklet, and the rough outline of the content that we wanted to include in the booklet. The content would include:

A short introduction on Little Dipper
Introduction on the specific playbox
Safety precautions
Short descriptions of the product/activities
QR codes for the video links
References and credits to resources and our experts

Danesha, Jia Qi and I will be in charge of drafting up the storyboarding for the videos, while Kerriane and Nandika will work on the instruction booklet. I volunteered to do the first 3 out of 7 storyboarding for the videos.

Most of our products has also arrived. From their measurements, I deduced that we would require the XL box, instead of the L box. Previously, we had identified the box model that we wanted, but were unsure of the size. We were also considering getting sample boxes to see which is the best fit. This is because we wanted our box to be the right size to be full when all the items are in, but it also has to be sufficiently big. However, I felt that getting sample boxes may increase our costs unnecessarily. I believed that with careful measurements, we would know the exact size to buy. And we did. After careful calculations, I am confident that XL boxes would be big enough for all our items and packaging, while the L box will be insufficient. I then assured my group to get the XL sized boxes.

In Week 13, we worked on our assigned portion. I drafted up the storyboarding for 3 activities (kinetic sand, threading, frozen pom poms), taking care to include the filming of the activities that cover the developments that we want to achieve, such as specific motor skills such as pincer grip, and more general skills like categorisation (eg colours, sizes). I also considered the angles that would be best to portrait each shot, as well as how to include subtitles or labels. It was quite fun imagining the ideal video in my head, putting them into words and storyboarding it.

Week 14

Packing Playboxes | Team Meeting

[26 Dec 2021 - 1 Jan 2022]

Jia Qi had collected the ordered boxes needed to put the products of our playboxes into. We all gathered at Nandika’s house on Monday to repackage and pack our 10 playboxes. Although it was “manual labour”, it was fun working together as a team. Together with the team dinner that we had, it felt like a bonding activity instead of work. We enjoyed the time spent together, and worked together well such that it never felt dull.

We calculated and measured the kinetic sand (and got it wrong initially so we had to repackage our repackaged sand!) and potato starch for oobleck mixture, sorted the bristle blocks, kinetic sand toys and pom poms, and repackaged them into smaller bags bought from SKP. After neatly packing all our items into our 10 black boxes, we splattered paint of metallic white colour onto the boxes to create a visual of a night sky full of stars. We are named after a star constellation after all :)

When all the packaging was done and we had 10 starry night playboxes drying on the floor, we had a team meeting to settle other aspects of our playboxes, such as storyboarding, our logo, instruction booklet, and marketing plan.

We all looked through the storyboarding done by me, Jia Qi, and Danesha. We are all agreeable that they were good to go. Kerriane had also redesigned the logo to stand out from our black boxes - from our initial dark blue starry sky logo to a sandy and pink coloured logo. We gave inputs for improvement. I suggested that the Little Dipper constellation be the same colour as one of the chosen pink, to minimize the number of colours used. My team agreed, and we have our finalized new logo!

Kerriane had also started a little on designing the instruction booklet and showed us the design, which closely followed the colours of the new logo.

I was tasked to come up with a detailed, in depth marketing plan the following week so that we can immediately carry it out once we are done with the video shoot and printing of the instruction booklets. I felt that it was a challenge as I had not done any proper marketing before. Yet, I was up for the challenge. I hope that through pushing myself, I would learn new skills to continue to apply in Little Dipper and even perhaps, other ventures, in the future.

Repackaging kinetic sand

Sorting bristle blocks

Decorating our playboxes with paint

Week 15

Instruction Booklet Feedback | Marketing Plan | Video Shoot | Team Blog

[2 Jan 2022 - 8 Jan 2022]

In Week 15, my team made progress on quite a few items. Our long awaited item, the stacking cups, have finally arrived! We could now pack these into the playboxes, completing the playbox other than the instruction booklets.

We also finalised our instruction booklet. After Nandika and Kerriane completed the initial draft of the booklet, the rest of us looked through it and gave feedback. I suggested a sleek format, which is to put the QR code as a smaller picture right beside the title, to give the contents an elegant look. My team seconded.

Of course, it was not always smooth and easy. We did have disagreements every now and then. An example was that my team was torn between the layout design of the booklet - to compress the description of 3 activities onto one page, or spread out the activities to 2 per page. We set up a poll to decide. I initially voted for 3 activities per page as it is more economical due to the smaller number of pages required, and I felt that it gave the impression that we are succinct. On the other hand, a few other members of the team countered that it may be too wordy and cluttered and rendering it more difficult for customers to read. After we discussed more pros and cons of each suggestion, I was convinced of the other design.

I am glad that my team works out differences in opinions cordially, and democratically makes decisions. I felt that we all played a part in developing our tight-knit team dynamics, where all of us feel that it is a safe place to voice out our concerns without being offensive, and help each other understand our viewpoints.

Originally, we sent the instruction booklet draft to Ms Angela to vet, as she has experience in this area. However, after a long while, she has not gotten back to us. Thus, I suggested to my group that we can send Ms Belinda and Fedore our draft for them to check as well. Perhaps they would be able to provide us some feedback. My group agreed, and I thus sent these 2 experts our draft. They both said they would look through it for us.

3 activities in a page

2 activities in a page

As the Chief Marketing Officer, I also did up the marketing plan for my team. The marketing plan includes:

Content and instructions for the IG/FB posts, including how to take the pictures to be posted, infographics, design etc
Plans for our digital marketing campaign on Facebook and Instagram, including AB testing if possible
Plans to engage with (micro)influencers

It was difficult planning for the digital marketing campaign on Facebook and Instagram as I had no experience carrying out digital marketing practically before. Even though I had learnt some tips from Mr Adrian's ET9122 E-Startups and Social Media Strategies course and researched more about it, I foresee that carrying it out on the Facebook ad manager will be very different from just knowing the theory. I look forward to exploring this area with my team and working together to do our best in marketing our playboxes. We hope to gain insights from the analysis provided from the ad manager, and know how to improve and direct our marketing efforts more efficiently in the future.

The rest of my team looked through the marketing plan after I was done, and gave positive feedback. I was very encouraged, and I believe that my team is on the same page and will continue to work well together to carry out our marketing plan.

Yet, our entrepreneurship journey is not a bed of roses. Soon after, we came across a hurdle. Our current contact for the baby video shoot had faltered in interest, and is not keen to do the video shoot with us anymore. Our backup plan was to contact Ms Shai, who is in contact with a parent with a child under 2 years old. However, we were unable to reach her. This setback had caused critical delays in our schedule, leaving us with an extremely tight schedule for marketing and sales, which can only come after obtaining our materials from our video shoot with the baby.

Our group decided to contact any other parents we know with babies under 2 years old to see if they are willing to do the video shoot with us. The situation is very urgent as we did not want to delay our schedule further. I was planning to ask a parent in my church after checking the age of her daughter.

But before I approached the parents, Nandika had good news for us! She had gotten a reply from her mother's colleague, who seemed very eager to do the video shoot with us. After explaining to her about our video shoot, and liaising with her for other details, such as location and timing, we got permission from her to do the video shoot with her child. We would be able to conduct the video shoot at her house next Saturday, 15 Jan, in the morning. As a precaution against the Covid-19 pandemic, she requested that only 3 out of 5 of my team go over to her house. After discussion, it was decided that Nandika, Kerriane and I would go over. Nandika as she was the point of contact; Kerriane as we needed her skills in video and photo shooting; and I to ensure that we have all the materials we need for marketing.

I had also chalked up in our marketing plan some content and photos we would need from this video shoot with the baby, including some pictures of the baby holding the playbox, and parent’s testimonial after using our playbox. We would also obtain permission from the parent to obtain and use these content.

All in all, after our original plan and backup plan had failed us, we were all glad and relieved that we did not give up and ultimately found somebody who is also very keen on the idea. Although this ordeal turned out well, I learnt that sometimes, a single backup plan may not be sufficient for the circumstances to come. We may need backup plans upon backup plans to cover more situations, but ultimately, we would not be able to have a backup plan for all challenges. In the end, our team has to come up with solutions on the spot, and stick together to pull through our troubles. I’m glad that I am fortunate to have a well-bonded team that supports one another especially when facing problems. We became more spurred on and proactive in finding solutions, and stuck tighter together to help one another.

Successful contacting!

Examples of footage required from video shoot (in red)

Meeting minutes on marketing

We also held a group meeting on Saturday night to settle the shooting details and the timeline for the printing of the instruction booklets. We hope to print a sample booklet in these 1-2 days to test the printing service. We would put placeholders in place of our product pictures and QR codes. I sent the printing template so that Kerriane can make the necessary adjustments to leave margins for the sides and corners. I was to place orders for the booklets after Kerriane has sent me the finalised pdf. We also decided that after the shoot with the baby, we would conduct the product shoot - close up of the items in our playbox.

I also headed the discussion of our social media posts - who to post, what captions to write, what picture to choose. It was decided that as the marketing executive, I would start off with the first post, including coming up with the captions and hashtags. I also referred the team to google keywords, which can help us identify specific hashtags that can increase the reach of our posts. Kerriane would send me the square version of our new logo - which I had planned to be the picture of our introductory post, and Nandika would help to vet the captions. I would then post them on both our Facebook pages and Instagram.

Time flies, and it is again my turn to complete the team blog. It was very exciting as we have just gotten the good news from Nandika after a long stressful week of delays and fruitless waiting. We were hopeful once again and I was grateful and elated to be able to write about our happy conclusion to our video shoot hiccup.

Week 16

Order Booklets | Facebook IG post | Video Shoot | Product Shoot | Team Meeting

[9 Jan 2022 - 15 Jan 2022]

What an eventful week! My team made a lot of progress this week, and 2 major milestones, our video and product shoots, were ticked off the checklist. Here’s our week’s events!

On Sunday, I was to place an order to print 1 set of booklet (MOQ = 2) to check the colours and quality of the booklets, and to use them as props for demo box. At first, my team was going to print with blank boxes as placeholder to look at how the overall layout would turn out. While looking at the pdf Kerriane sent our group to check before printing, I came up with an idea to include actual QR codes in the sample booklet to check if the size of our QR codes is suitable and not too small to be scanned easily. (This is because we have decided to place the QR codes right next to the activity titles for aesthetic purposes.) My team agreed that it was a good idea, and Kerriane made the changes to the booklet, even managing to insert our Little Dipper logo into the QR codes. After final checks by my team, I placed the order to print the booklets from the printing company that I had sourced previously. I completed the reimbursement procedure established by my team, and was reimbursed by Jiaqi from our LLP account.

Final sample booklet with safety margins and QR codes for testing

1st post planning

I also prepared the content for our first Facebook and Instagram posts on Sunday, as indicated in the marketing timeline. I wrote the caption to introduce Little Dipper, and placed it in our shared document for posts. Nandika also helped to edit the caption, and proposed a few different versions of the captions. In the end, I combined 2 of her versions and made some further edits. This became the finalised version of our very first post caption. The rest of the team also approved. I also used photoshop to make some small edits to the square version photo of our Little Dipper logo that Kerrianne sent me. On Monday at 6pm, I posted the photo and caption on both our FB and IG. Statistically, this is shown to be the time of the day that most users scroll through social media. We hope that by posting at this time would increase our viewership and impressions. Indeed, there are many considerations that go just into 1 post, and was not as simple as I initially thought.

I also encouraged all members to re-share post on their own Instagram stories to increase publicity. I then reposted them on our Little Dipper account stories to increase activity of our business account and hopefully, the Meta algorithm would help to boost our post.

1st Post!

Gift of appreciation

pics of vid shoot

On 15 January, Nandika, Kerriane and I met early in the morning to prepare for our video and photoshoot with the baby. I had brought some materials for the shoots, such as cute animal ice trays for our frozen pompom exploration activity. I had also bought chocolates the day before for Zee Yun (Nandika’s contact that has agreed to the photoshoot with her baby) and her family as a gift of appreciation. Fortunately, it was Zee Yun’s favorite brand of chocolates! I was very glad that she appreciated our gift.

The baby video shoot was more difficult than we thought, as the baby was slightly younger (11 months) than our target age group (1-2 years old), and was not exactly suitable for all the activities. (Some activities were targeted more towards the 2 year mark, and require more advanced skills.) We also had no experience interacting with babies, much less instructing the baby to follow what we wanted. Thus, we had to rely on wooing the baby and trying to capture her attention. Following her mother’s example, I learnt that large actions and making noises can capture a baby’s attention, and tried very hard to do that behind the camera so that Kerriane could get shots with the baby smiling and/or looking at the camera. Other than that, Nandika and I also set up the materials for the next activity while Kerriane is finishing up the shoot of the previous activity. We three worked well together, cooperating with one another and Zee Yun to make the most of the short 2 hours that we have. It was definitely not easy to capture good shots of the baby for 8 activities in that short span of time, but I am glad that my team worked together, looking for gaps that we can fill, helping one another to ensure we can get all our shots.

It was a good experience as well, to see for the first time how a baby would like the toys in our playbox. I was heartened to see that the baby enjoyed the activities that are more targeted towards the 1 year olds (and thus more appropriate for her age), such as the Very Hungry Caterpillar book, bristle blocks, pom poms, and hand paint. Of course, she would need to be slightly older before she can properly enjoy the sand play and oobleck mixture. I also noticed that the baby is more attracted towards the brighter coloured toys, such as the bristle blocks. Zee Yun, too, gave us feedback that these toys are generally appropriate for the baby, and also assured us that based on her experience with her now older kids, the more “advanced” toys would also be enjoyed when they reach the appropriate age. Thus, we are assured that our playbox could target the whole age range of 1-2. We decided to detail the “levels” of the toys in our instructional videos so that the parents could identify which toys to start out with, and how to advance play when their baby grows. Zee Yun also pointed out that some pompoms that we chose are too small for the baby, as babies tend to put small items into their mouths. We would be changing the pom poms to larger sizes in the future.

After the shoot, we also discussed with Zee Yun if she would be willing to give us her testimonial to be posted in our social media pages. She agreed! We were ecstatic when she also agreed to post about our playbox on her Instagram account so that her friends who also have kids can know about our playbox as well.

Behind the scenes of product shoot

Even though we were exhausted after the video shoot (I’m beginning to appreciate the amount of energy and time parents put into caring for a child!), we persevered through the afternoon for our product shoot. I had brought along towels (for background) and other materials for the shoot, and we proceeded to Kerriane’s house to take the shots. Kerriane had prepared the type of shots to be taken, and Nandika and I had looked through it. We again collaborated well to efficiently conduct the shoot. I was to be the “hand model” while Kerriane took the pictures. Nandika also helped with the preparation of the materials. I learnt how to position items on the table to give the picture an aesthetic feel, and also see how Kerriane positions the camera to take pictures at the right angles.

During the shoot, Kerriane and I had to work in sync - I had to time my movements well to match with her camera movements, to produce a professional-looking video clip. I learnt to observe her movements and match her speed and range of motion. All in all, it was a unique experience as I had never done a photoshoot before. These shots of the products will be used for our social media posts and instruction booklet.

Pictures taken from product shoot

Team meeting

After, we had our team meeting, where we had a Zoom call with Jia Qi and Danesha, and finalised many details. We first decided on the selling price of our playbox, which would be $59, and we would give a 22% opening discount for a limited period (discounted price would be $49). We also reached a consensus on delivery price. After much discussion, my team also decided to dedicate a total of 23 boxes for giveaways, 1 to Zee Yun, and 2 others to any microinfluencers we can contact. Jia Qi and Danesha have also conducted “research” on microinfluencers, shortlisting a number of microinfluencers whose content is appropriate in promoting our playboxes. Together as a team, edited the list, and scheduled to dm the influencers after our 2nd post. Jia Qi and Danesha would be in charge of writing the caption of the 2nd post, which is to go up on 16th Jan morning. We also decided to have another post, post 2.2, before our 3rd post (opening discount post) to show some contents of our boxes. Nandika and I are in charge of drafting the caption of this additional post. Kerriane would choose and edit the photos from our shoot for both posts. Other points that we discussed include our payment method, as we are starting sales. We decided to go with the familiar order method - by Google Forms. We would also start sourcing more suppliers from Alibaba and Taobao, to reduce costs for future batches. I’m glad that my team and I are already taking a wider view of things and are making decisions for the long run.

I also briefly went through the idea of paid ads and media buy with my team, and we finalised some details such as spending $20/week, as had been done by previous teams, and would be still within our budget when we run the ads for the whole month of February. I was to come up with a detailed step-by-step plan on how we are to proceed with the media buy for the month. Finally, my team is to finalise our instruction booklet by the end of the week. Kerriane would edit and add the photos in. Nandika has also gotten some feedback from her friend who is experienced in designing, and would make some tweaks to the aesthetics of our booklets. It is eye-opening to see how the smallest details in design can affect one’s impression on a product. For example, the shapes of the background design should be round and curvy, as sharper and thinner shapes suggest danger. We should thus avoid those shapes and aim for curvy and round designs, as well as soft colours. After the final edits, I would send in the printing order for all playboxes by 23 January.

All in all, it was a busy week and I’m grateful that my team is proactive and cooperative, which enabled us to progress by leaps and bounds.

Week 17

[16 Jan 2022 - 22 Jan 2022]

This week was quite busy for all of us.

We are scheduled to put up our 2nd post - introducing what we do at Little Dipper, and announcing our launch of our first playbox. Jia Qi and Danesha have come up with the first draft of the captions, and the rest of us helped to edit and refine it. I shortened the text and added appropriate emojis to liven up the captions.

However, my team had some miscommunication, and the post did not go up. Kerriane suggested that as the Chief Marketing Officer, I could take charge of the posting of each post. I readily agreed as it would be more efficient to have one person in charge of the posting. I was also eager and glad to be able to take charge of the execution of our marketing plans. I then put the 2nd post up.

Additionally, I came up with the idea of liking and commenting in our Little Dipper post with our own IG accounts to hype it up, and hopefully increase engagement with the public. It was successful! Our post generated 7 comments, out of which 3 is from the public. Many comments also have “likes” from the public. It was heartwarming to see interactions and engagement with the post increase through this tactic - that people would be more comfortable to comment if others had done so already. We hope that the algorithms of Instagram would pick up these activities, and would be more likely to show our posts in the feed of our followers, and suggest our account to others.

Lastly, I shared our post on our Instagram story too, along with reposting the publicity stories from our own accounts (similar to first post). I also included a gif to capture audiences attention. With more activity from our account, I hope that we will have a higher chance of appearing in someone's IG feed, as well as be favoured more in Instagram's algorithm.

2nd post planning

2nd Post!!

Comments in 2nd post

Story to promote 2nd post

In view of our miscommunication earlier in the week, my team came together to have a serious talk on how to collaborate better. We decided to have bi-weekly team meetings on zoom to check in with one another, and to ensure we are all on the same page. I am glad that we are all fully committed to communicating better with each other and to increasing accountability within the team. Hopefully, with these new measures, we can pick ourselves up and support one another in this journey.

Post 2.2!!

Post 2.2 Comments

In the middle of the week, Nandika and I crafted the caption for post 2.2, and Kerriane edited the pictures for the post. This post is about the toys in our boxes and the development milestones that can be achieved with the chosen activities. We chose pictures from our baby shoot that depict the interaction between the mum and the child with our playbox, to show the interaction emphasis of our playbox. Again, I encouraged the team to comment in the post to generate more engagement and interaction from the public. It worked again! Our post received some comments from the public. I also came up with another idea to ask questions in the comments, and reply from our Little Dipper account, so that we can answer possible common questions. It was exciting to come up with and try new ideas to see what works to generate more engagement with the public, to raise awareness of our brand and what we do. Indeed, having comments in place helps to open up those who view our posts, and increase their interaction with our content.

After the essential posts are up, my team dm-ed the micro influencers we have shortlisted with a msg telling them about our playboxes, and offering to let their children try out our boxes in exchange for some publicity. Out of the 8 influencers we reached out to, only 3 of them replied - killjilllll, _mrschia_, and familystaysg. _mrschia_, and familystaysg asked for more details about the box, which we happily provided along with pictures and explanations. However, they did not respond to us after that (we would again reach out to them in the near future should they still fail to reply). In the end, only killjilllll was eager to try out the boxes, and promised to do up some posts to share about our boxes. We would discuss with her more about the content of the posts in the future, after delivering the boxes, and letting her child try the box out. We were so excited when killjilllll agreed to try out our playbox! It is another huge milestone for Little Dipper to have successfully engaged with microinfluencers, and we are very excited to see how far our LLP can grow. We have to plan our future steps quicker now, with Little Dipper’s progress shooting forward at a pace that we did not expect. Even though there’s more work cut out for us, I’m very glad that we managed to reach this milestone. A learning point is that we could plan with longer foresight, and anticipate scenarios and changes so that we will be even more prepared when we advance forward.

Successful outreach!

As the Chief Marketing Manager, I made a Media Buy Plan, showing the different parameters and decisions we can choose in Facebook’s ads manager, as well as my recommendations. I made drafts of the marketing campaign that Little Dipper would be pushing out in the next week. There were many crucial considerations. For example, a variable of paramount importance is the campaign objective, as it would indicate the aim of our campaign and decide how the ads algorithm will run. I was deciding between traffic, engagement, and video views, depending on what my team would like to do. Personally, I felt that engagement would be the best as more people would interact with our posts and share our content. Yet, if my team decides to post a video, then video views would be more optimal. With a similar mindset, I adjusted the budget, schedule and other variables to try to maximise the performance of our campaign.

Another critical parameter is the attributes for our target audience. Much care and thought has to be put into this to target the correct audience to increase the effectiveness of the ads. I first chose the appropriate age of parents with young toddlers (26-35), and chose to target females as they are more likely to browse social media to purchase things for their children. I also selected the appropriate demographics for the parents.

In addition, I was thinking of putting the interests of our target audience under the “AND” function in the ads manager, which is to only target people in both categories - chosen demographics AND interests. However, the estimated audience size is already quite small, and it would not be wise to further narrow our target audience, and I decided against it.

I look forward to presenting my media buy plan to my team in our next internal meeting. :D

Campaign Objective

Budget and Schedule

Attributes for Target Audience

Estimated Audience Size of Chosen Parameters

Lastly, my team also looked through the final feedback of our booklets, and made appropriate edits. They should be ready for printing early next week, to be ready for our sales launch.

All in all, many accomplishments for the team this week. :)

Week 18

[23 Jan 2022 - 29 Jan 2022]

This week was also pretty packed. We started off the week with a team meeting on Sunday night. Here are our completed agenda for the meeting:

To prepare for more sales and future orders, our team decided to take a leap of faith and purchase the materials for the next batch of 10 boxes.

In view of our journey with Little Dipper in the long term, we also discussed several other platforms where we can obtain our materials at a cheaper price, such as alibaba.

We nailed down the content that we would want our influencers to publicise for us, and would request this of killjilllll when she has tested out our boxes.

Financial documents such as invoice and order forms are discussed, and Jia Qi, our CFO, will be in charge.

We also finalised our booklet, renaming our activities to titles that are more fun, appealing and engaging to the parents. Kerriane would do up the product videos for the booklets (to introduce each activity to the parents) and include the respective QR codes in the booklet. I was to send the booklets for printing by Tuesday.

For our social media, we were to start a series of IG story highlights, where we give more detailed answers to frequently asked questions that our posts may not be able to address. It is to give potential customers more information about our product, and for them to find out more about us. This is essential as we are a new brand. Kerrianne and I would put them up on IG across the week. We would save them to highlights so that potential customers can continue to view them even after the 24 hour story period.

Final booklet with creative activity titles

First of FAQ series

Campaign Objectives Choices

Demographics and Interests

Finally, I went through the media buy plan I’ve done in the week with the team, to help them understand how we could do up our Facebook ads, and the different options we can choose for the parameters. I’ve first explored and read up about media buy using Facebook Ads manager, and have noted down the options that I believe best suited our team. I presented them with the different options, along with the choices that I deemed best.

For example, our campaign objective is a crucial decision point. If we want to go with a video post, we could input our objective as “video views” which will send our ads to people among our target audience who are most likely to view video posts. However, if we want more likes, shares, and comments for our posts, we can choose engagement instead.

Other options include placement (IG, FB etc), budget and schedule (I learnt that A/B testing is usually done for 4-7 days, and $5 per day would be a good gauge for starters like us), as well as the most crucial options - attributes. I picked 26-35 for age, and chose to target females as I believe that that would be a suitable age for parents with kids of ages 0-2, and that females would be more likely to search on social media for products for their children. Demographics and interest would be the most important of the attributes. I managed to narrow down our audience demographics to new parents and parents with children aged 0-2. As for interest, I brainstormed with my group for products that parents would be interested in getting for their toddlers. However, the trade off of narrowing our audience with this set of attributes is that our target audience size would be considered very small. We agreed that we would ask for advice on this aspect during our consultation.

I would input the decisions made into the ads manager and kick off the digital marketing campaign after the consultation.

Our team has decided to do A/B testing to find out which parameters work most effectively for our campaign, before scaling up our marketing efforts. I suggested that we could ask Mr Adrian from MediaFreaks to see if we are on track. (Mr Roderick says that Mr Adrian is not available, but his colleague, Lili, would be coming on.) To present our ideas in the consultation, I worked out an A/B testing table, and prepared some questions to ask Lili.

A/B testing table

Questions

In the consultation, Lili advised us to do up “higher tier” posts to convince our audiences why they should purchase our products, before conducting media buy on our promotional videos. We realised that despite our social media efforts, we had not truly brought out our unique selling point to our customers. My group then decided to focus our posts more on our unique content and credibility, giving our customers even more details of our box, instead of keeping things confidential.

On our media buy parameters, Lili suggests that we can leave the age range as wide as possible, as we have already included the age of parents in our demographic choice (parents with children ages 0-2). As selecting more “interests” would decrease our audience reach, Lili also advised us to leave it open, and A/B test our posts’ content instead (eg videos, carousell, photos, and captions). My team later decided to have 1 video for our posts, and another shorter video for our IG stories. We would A/B test these 2 (testing: placements - story vs post - and video content).

Mr Roderick also suggested that we can find alternative audiences than parents to increase our reach. I was thinking that we could target people buying gifts to friends who have children of the targeted age in the next round - perhaps it will work!

We ended the day with a internal meeting to consolidate and to round up the consultation points. We also refined our media buy parameters. We decided to heed Lili’s advice and do A/B testing on a more detailed (and longer) video in a post with a caption introducing our box’s USP and a IG story with a short 15 sec video on our playbox and activities. Our campaign objectives will be video views and we would conduct the testing for 7 days, with a lifetime budget of $35 (around $5 a day). We aimed to start the campaign the next week. Kerriane would do up the videos, and the rest of the team would give feedback and suggestions throughout of next week to finalise our marketing videos.

We also launched a post detailing our sales launch to end off the week!

Internal Team Meeting

Sales Post

Week 19

Delivery of Playbox to First Influencer | Resharing of Influencer’s IG Stories | Team Meeting - Refining Marketing Direction | Start of Media Buy

[30 Jan 2022 - 5 Feb 2022]

CNY is around the corner! Our team took a well deserved break during CNY.

We started off the rest of the week by delivering our playbox to our first micro-influencer - killjilllll! We are all so excited that killjilllll immediately posted a series of IG stories about her 2 year old playing with the toys, with great feedback such as keeping her engaged. We reshared the stories in our Little Dipper IG account and obtained permission to keep them in our highlights as a testimony.

That very night, we received an order! We were extremely elated at the successful conversion through micro-influencer publicity efforts. It was another milestone achieved - our very first order from the public! We would be delivering the playbox to the customer by end of next week.

Micro-Influencer Story Testimonial

Ad sets in our campaign

Before our team meeting on 4 Feb, I did up a draft of our digital marketing campaign in the FB Ads Manager. However, there were still some point that I could not comprehend, such as how the budget is allocated between the ad sets and the ads within the campaign. I was unable to find answers online, and thus reached out to a friend who is more experienced in this area to help.

I went on a call with him to clarify some input parameters, and how to wire up the ad sets for A/B testing. I learnt that if we want to do different placements (eg FB IG post vs stories on IG only), we would have to use different ad sets, but if it was just to change the content of the posts, we could use different ads within the ad set. Budget would count towards the ad set, and thus would be spread across all the ads we have in the ad set. After learning about this information, I was clearer on how to set up our parameters for our media buy. I chose to conduct A/B testing on different ad sets as we are changing the placements, and each ad set would only have 1 ad, to keep things simple. My friend also recommended a website for me to reference: https://madgicx.com/a-b-testing-facebook

In our internal meeting on Saturday (4 Feb), I went through the finalised parameters that I have drafted up with the team. Yet, the launch of the digital marketing campaign was not as smooth as we hoped. As usual, we were met with some problems. There were many hiccups along the way. Posting the post as an ad was not easy, as I had to include our LittleDipper link in the post (possible for FB in the caption but not for IG, and thus requiring some customisation). In the end, I also included the link under “learn more”, such that viewers can be redirected to our Linktree website through the post. Additionally, there were problems selecting the thumbnail for our video. However, after much trial and error and help from the team, I managed to edit the thumbnail. We tested posting the video on FB to ensure that the thumbnail works. Fortunately, it did! I was very stressed then due to the pressed time and many hiccups. But I'm extremely grateful for supportive teammates who work through the problems with me and helped out when they can. My team stuck together and helped one another resolve the problems we face even though it was very late at night. It is only with their support that I was able to press on and overcome all the problems along the way. We persevered, and finally got past the problem :) I do hope that our ads would increase our reach and generate sales, if not, at least more brand awareness.

I finished inputting the media buy parameters that night, and our marketing post went up on time on Sunday morning. Right after, I selected the appropriate post to boost and set the campaign to run.

I would be in charge of monitoring and analysing the insights we obtain from this campaign's run. That Sunday night, I went to look at our media buy insights and explore the reports that I could generate. I found that I could personalise the data to the parameters that I want, such as categorising our data by date, time, age and placements. These parameters are important for us as we can find out which day and time invite the most traffic, and what demographics is our target audience generally composed of. From the first day, I could see from the data that it was mostly females aged 25-34, just as I have predicted previously. I will be cleaning the data and conducting data analysis on all of the data after 7 days.

Marketing post we had media buy on

In our internal meeting, we also settled a few other points to move our venture forward. We drafted out a detailed marketing post plan together, where we would write our posts’ content, caption, and media buy plans in the google sheets. It would help us to stay updated with each other, and can easier help one another edit the captions. We decided that we would look at the results of our A/B testing and replan how we would like to go about doing our second round of A/B testing. We also indicated that we would try to get killjilllll to write a testimonial for us, and possibly do a cross post with her. We would also include Zee’s testimonial soon. I would be in charge of posting all the social media posts.

Marketing Post Plan

Week 20

[6 Feb 2022 - 12 Feb 2022]

The week started off with a mini crisis! As detailed in the team blog, we found out that the website which we generated our QR codes from has changed its policy, and would require us to pay a large fee to continue using the QR codes. After some brainstorming, we decided that we would print the stickers ourselves.

I travelled down to the school’s printing services to check if there is a laser printer to print our stickers at a high quality. However, the school’s printing services have closed down! We would have to print our stickers with external printing services. Time is extremely tight as we only have a few days left to deliver our playbox to our first customer.

With much coordination within our team, we managed to print and paste the stickers and deliver on time. Crisis averted :)

I learnt that when life throws lemons at you, make lemonade. We can always make the best of the situations we are given with.

Increased QR code pricing

Printing shop closed down

New post series

My team was not fazed by this setback, and went ahead on time with our marketing schedule. We introduced the first of our new series of posts - which will detail 2 of our activities in each post, to help potential customers understand the activities in our box and how it is beneficial to the child. We recognise that to attract customers, we have to give more information on our box to convince them to purchase it. We should not be afraid of “copycats” as the exact play and suggested interactions of the activities are kept confidential and difficult to replicate without professionals’ help. The first of these posts would be on threading and finger painting. Again, after putting up the post, I reminded all team members to like, share and comment to increase engagement on the post.

Unfortunately, we are met with yet another problem - Zee’s testimonial post had to be delayed due to unforeseen circumstances. Due to her situation, she was unable to provide us her testimonial until a later date. Thus, we postponed her post to give her more time to prepare.

On 9th Feb, our team received our 2nd order from the public! I was very excited as I believed this is the fruit of our first round of digital marketing. Killjilllll's stories were a week ago while our marketing campaign was still running, and hence I believe that the order was made after seeing our ads. From our form, we could see that she is a first time parent! I'm glad that we are able to reach out to the right audiences and hep their children have fun while learning with our playbox. We would be delivering to here by the end of the next week, after she has completed the payment.

2 orders from the public so far!

Media Buy Insights

At the end of the week, we came together for a team meeting to analyse our media buy insights, review marketing strategies and posts for the upcoming week.

Our video post performed better than our IG story, with the post reaching 1635 people and generating 4062 impressions, while the story reached 1104 people and generated 3141 impressions. (Reach is the number of people who saw our ads at least once while impressions is the number of times our ads were on screen, which may include multiple views of our ads by the same people). However, both had little engagement. In fact, our stories did not have any engagement at all, while our post generated a total of 5 post reactions and 11 link clicks, only 1 of which was a successful conversion - our 2nd order. This makes the conversion rate extremely low, less than 0.1%. This may be because our campaign objective was video views, and not traffic or engagement, or even, conversions. To look on the bright side, we are a new company and probably need more traction in the market before our conversion rates can increase. We can continue to attempt different marketing strategies to see which ones work best.

Our story ads also fare better on IG than on Facebook. For our story, 890 out of 1104 reach was from IG stories. For the video post, Instagram feed reached 638 people, followed by FB instant article at 565, and FB Feed: News Feed at 539, out of the total 1635. Although individually, IG feed performed the best for the post, collectively, Facebook provided us with higher reach. We could focus on these channels in the future. The results for the post is a surprise as we predicted that young parents would use IG more than FB.

In addition, there were a total of 6495 plays of our videos, but out of the many plays, only a small margin (275) of viewers watched our video till the end. This may be due to most people skipping our ads. In fact, a large proportion of our views (2845) were 3 seconds or below. This indicates that many people were skipping our ads instead of watching them, which is quite a typical behaviour. As people have short attention spans, it is crucial to capture their attention in the first few seconds of our video.

We decided to try boosting static posts (pictures), to see if this will capture the attention of viewers better, instead of videos, which are longer. We would boost one of our older posts (our 2nd post) which describes the USP of our playboxes, and a new post that would briefly introduce all the content of our playbox to allow people to know us more. Our 2nd post would be representative of a post that has a shorter caption, and our new ad post would be one with a longer caption with more details of our box. We would A/B test the 2 and see which our target audience prefers. Initially, we wanted to make our new post within the ads manager, so that it would not appear as a new post on our FB and IG feed (as we feared it would be repetitive). However, ads manager did not allow us to make an ad with a carousel, but only allowed us to upload 1 picture. Hence, we decided to post it as a new post on our feed and boost the post instead.

At first, I was pondering if traffic would be a good campaign objective, as this objective would help us reach people who would be more likely to click into our linktree and check out our brand (our linktree has links to our FB, IG, order forms etc). However, traffic is usually used by more established companies. On the other hand, if we chose this objective, our traffic would be extremely negligible. With our limited budget, our number of link clicks is predicted to be 0. However, if we chose engagement, we would be able to achieve a higher rate of interactions with our post (19-55 engagements), even if it has a smaller reach than our first campaign (video views). After some thought, we settled on engagement as our objective.

Traffic reach

Engagement reach

Video views reach (first round of media buy)

Boosting 2nd post

New Ad Post

Automated Questions and Response

I also suggested changing another parameter - the target audience, to have our new ad target audiences that are interested in buying their friends gifts for their children. I selected the interest, “baby shower”, to target people who are finding a gift for babies, instead of just parents. This greatly widens our audience, and hopefully our reach would increase drastically as well!

When I was doing up the posts, ads manager’s restrictions presented a new problem. With the engagement objective, call to action for boosting a post is restricted to only “send message”. I would not be able to include the link in our post with “learn more” to redirect audiences to our linktree. I chose to use “send message” rather than having no buttons, as it is still more convenient for potential customers to contact us through messenger by clicking from the ad than having to navigate to our social media home pages. I also used the automated question and answer component to give automated quick answers to frequently asked questions. In this way, potential customers can get to know more about the product without waiting for one of us to reply.

I did up the necessary inputs for our 2nd round of media buy, posted the new post on Sunday and started the 2nd digital marketing campaign on Sunday morning.

This week, I'm again in charge of the team blog, and ended off the week with the completion of the team blog, narrating our week's happenings and our learnings.

Week 21-22

[13 Feb 2022 - 26 Feb 2022]

Valentine’s around the corner! My team specially put up a valentine’s post to ride on the occasion. It would be part of the post series introducing 2 activities at a time. This time, it would be kinetic sand and oobleck mixture.

We also contacted more micro-influencers whose content is relevant to toddlers and can potentially collaborate with us. In the end, 2 of them replied! One is lovelledebra, who have a toddler named Avery, and another, harleyharpertwins, is an account managed by their mother nellielim.

Lovelle, the mother of Avery, was very enthusiastic in letting Avery try out the box and is willing to help us post and publicise Little Dipper on her IG account. After delivering her the box, she posted a series of IG stories and allowed us to share and include as highlights in our Little Dipper IG account. Furthermore, she also dm-ed us a picture of Avery playing with the box! We would use that for her testimonial post in the future. She also promised that she would continue to tag us in her new posts when she tries out each item in the box over time. I was heartened that Avery liked our playbox, and that Lovelle gave feedback that he was very intrigued by the toys! It assures us that we have produced a playbox that is liked by toddlers and is getting positive reception by the young users.

On the other hand, Nellie would require us to pay a fee in order for her to post and tag us. Due to our limited capital, we felt that the returns from proceeding with this deal would not be worth the expenses. Thus, we did not take up the offer and declined cordially. Hopefully, we will have an opportunity to work with them next time!

Valentine's Post

Story with Lovelledebra

Picture with Avery

Discussion with Harleyharpertwins

Our digital campaign 2.0 is also completed this week. I took a look at the insights. Our new ad which targets people who are buying gifts for friends with babies/toddlers has the most reach of 2465 people, around double that of our new ad that targets parents (1206), and nearly 3 times the reach of our 2nd post (839). That test set also has the highest number of link clicks (17), compared to 2 and 6 respectively.

Yet, we must caution ourselves from jumping into conclusion that this target group is the most effective out of all the combinations tested in both rounds of digital marketing. This is because of the fact that even though the number of link clicks is the highest in this test set, the number of actual purchases through this test set is 0. We are not able to conclude that this test set gave us the highest conversion rate, and the higher number of clicks may be solely due to the higher number of people reached.

As for the placements, our new ad performed best on Facebook News Feed by a huge margin (Reach: 1204 out of 1206 for our new ad targeted to parents, and 2443 out of 2465 for our new ad targeted to people buying gifts). Our boosted 2nd post also yield similar results, with FB News Feed performing best (Reach: 760 out of 867), followed by Instagram Feed (124 out of 867).

This is different from our previous round of testing, where Instagram fared the best individually, with FB instant article close behind, followed by FB News Feed. In this case, FB News Feed fared much, much better. Yet, I am unsure of the reason why. Perhaps our Facebook has gained online traction? But this would be contrary to the previous data that most users in our demographics prefer Instagram. More thought has to be given to this.

Unsurprisingly, all three ad sets have the highest reach to females aged 25-34, followed by females aged 35-44. This is also similar to the previous round of media buy, and we can safely conclude that these groups of people are the most likely to be searching on social media for things related to babies and toddlers.

More details and comparisons on both rounds of media buy insights will be presented during the presentation on 9 March :)

In the middle of the week, Nandika told us of the possibility of getting interns on board Little Dipper! She was approached by 2 juniors who would like a taste of entrepreneurship. They seem to have a good attitude and are very willing to learn. We were to come up with questions to interview them and decide if we would want them to join us until the summer. After hearing more from her, I was sold on the idea as we could use some more pairs of hands on manual work, such as delivery. We interned the potential interns in the following week, and based on their answers to our questions, it can be seen that they would be able to help us after the mod ends, and they are very willing to learn and move Little Dipper forward in the near future.

Our team also had a meeting to discuss the future of Little Dipper - our plans after the ET9135 module. We all had different commitments other than Little Dipper, and varying expectations for Little Dipper. Generally, the consensus was to aim to get Little Dipper to breakeven in a few months, and to ramp up our digital marketing after pinpointing out the best parameters to perform media buy. Most of the members who are able to continue would like to commit until at least the end of year. However, due to different commitments, not all of us will be able to continue in Little Dipper. In the case of a shareholder leaving the LLP, the remaining shareholders will buy out the portion of the shareholders in the amount they want, as per our exit plan agreement. Remaining shareholders thus may not have equal share of the entity anymore. Main points of the meeting is summarised in the picture on the right.

Interview Minutes

Meeting Minutes

Zee's Testimonial

On a more cheery note, Zee managed to pass us her testimonial! We converted it to a post and I put it up on both FB and IG. She had mentioned that her daughter really enjoyed it, especially the pompoms and bristle blocks, which were more suitable for her age (nearer to 1 years old than 2).

We also came up with the outline of the presentation to have a head start in preparing the presentation for the business showcase on 9 March. The outline is as depicted in the picture on the right.

Outline of Presentation

Week 23

3rd playbox order | Final Post of Activity Series | Preparation of Presentation

[27 Feb 2022 - 5 Mar 2022]

What a joy at the start of the week! One of our experts whom we consulted, Shuqi, wanted to buy a playbox from us and ordered one! She is supportive of our playbox and wants to use it when teaching in her school and is thinking of getting one for her niece and one of her friend’s daughters as well. I'm glad that our expert believes in the playbox that we had curated with her advise, and trusts us so much that she would want to use our box when teaching in school.

On Thursday, I also put up the final posts in the series of introducing the activities in our playbox. This time, it would be The Very Hungry Caterpillar book and the Stacking Cups. We will put up micro-influencers’ testimonial (killjilllll and lovelledebra) when they get back to us.

Throughout the week, my team was in preparations for the presentation on 9 March. We worked on the slides and met on Saturday to consolidate and make final edits. I was in charge of the marketing portion of the 2nd agenda, Our Journey. I did an extensive analysis on our media buy insights, and used infographics to present the data clearly to the audiences. I also draw out some conclusions and learnings from our data, and steps that we can take to improve our future marketing strategy. However, due to the time constrain of the presentation, I had to summarise the many findings and bring out only the most important or surprising finds. We also rehearsed the presentation together on Sunday. All the best to us for the Business Showcase! We have gone through so much together, I'm glad that we are able to share our learnings with others :)

Expert's positivity on our playbox!

Series' last post

Presentation Agenda

Conclusions and Reflections

This whole journey had been nothing but fulfilling. Looking back, I have learnt and grown so much through developing Little Dipper with the team. The journey was arduous and full of potholes, but I’m glad we are able to get past them one by one as we work together towards a common goal.

We had to adapt and change our plans according to situations we encountered, and stay on the ball in case we ran into any problems (which is not uncommon). We continuously refined our ideas, and learnt to make difficult choices that could affect the direction and success of the team, especially when there are opposing views.

I realised that communication is a crucial skill while working in a team. It allows us to stay on the same page, and work out differences when required. I’m grateful to have a team that is very open when communicating with another, and this allowed us to work seamlessly with one another.

Personally, I learnt much about digital marketing through this venture, and was glad I challenged myself to take up the role of the Chief Marketing Officer. From learning more about it, asking more experienced peers for help, to implementing it practically for Little Dipper, I have managed to explore and discover more about the world of digital marketing. Doing media buy and A/B testing was as exciting as it was nerve-wracking. This is because our marketing strategy and how well we leverage the platform’s algorithm can directly impact our effectiveness and success in our out-reach and in turn, sales. Yet, I was thankful to have a chance to try it out and take responsibility for it for the team, on top of other roles and duties. After 2 rounds of media buy, I’m glad to say that we have gained some insights on the audience we are targeting, and will continue to tweak our marketing strategy to appeal to our audiences.

In the end, we managed to obtain 3 sales orders for our playbox - 1 sales conversion from micro-influencers’ publicity, another sales conversion from digital marketing, and the last order from an expert whom we consulted. We were extremely elated as we had set a goal to sell off at least 1 playbox to the public before the ET9135 module ends (aside from give-away playboxes for testing and publicity). All in all, we gave away 3 playboxes for publicity efforts and sold off another 3. In addition, feedback given by our micro-influencers when they test out our boxes are generally positive!

Although we have just started out and have yet to breakeven, I believe that with the right marketing strategy to raise brand awareness and credibility, coupled with the lowering of our cost price, we will be able to breakeven eventually.

Most importantly, I'm glad that I got to make 4 great friends in this journey, and even went through thick and thin with them. They are the reason why this journey, however hard, was enjoyable and worthwhile. May our friendship last! :)

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