Description:

This course focuses on experiential learning through creating an arts-based venture as a team, combining the disciplines of artistic and business creativity. After extensive market research and analysis, students will develop and test an MVP (minimum viable product), create a business plan to determine if the venture is viable, and present their venture to a panel of guests. 

 

Reflection:

Throughout the semester, I worked with a team to create an arts-related entrepreneurial project that could create a positive impact on society. After many interviews, surveys, and extensive market research, our team molded our idea into a business, impArt. impArt is a music education and mentorship platform for customers to easily schedule and book university student teachers such as Duke students to teach students any field in the arts and serve as a mentor. 

 

We learned how to develop a MVP (minimum viable product) and a plan to test it. After recruiting potential Duke student teachers who wanted to participate in our test trial of our MVP, we designed a website with the profiles of our teachers and created an easy way for customers to book teachers and pay online. However, due to COVID-19, we had to shift our entire platform online and redefine our target customers and market size. Despite these changes, we were still able to test our MVP and had a customer receive a lesson from one of our teachers through zoom. 

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Learning about competitive position, sustainability, and budgeting, we identified our main cost drivers and risks and created a business analysis of the base, pessimistic, and optimistic cases of our model to estimate when we would break even and the potential profits and losses from our business. Integrating all of these elements of our plan, we analyzed what venture capitalist investors look for and created a risk reward analysis of our business. Through our initial investor presentation, we ultimately came to the conclusion that if we were to pursue this business, our low risk business did not need a large initial investment and was not something large venture capitalists would necessarily want to invest in.

 

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Artifact:

This is our final investor presentation where we discuss our platform, the problems it solves for our customers and student teachers, our market, business model analysis and projections, our MVP, and our final conclusion.