11A- Idea Napkin

1)    You. Who you are. What your talents are. What your skills and experiences are. Also: what are your aspirations? Specifically, regarding your business concept, how do you see this business (if you were to start it) playing a role in your life?

I am a student at the University of Florida, with an interest in Quantitative studies. My talents are understanding data and developing alternatives to doing things based on this data. My skills and experience that are most relevant to this venture are that I’ve been a consumer of the media for years, reading it daily and studying current events and politics. If I were to start this business. I’d run it with guest contributions on the side, bootstrapping it until I could design it to be sustainable.

2)    What are you offering to customers? Describe the product or service (in other words, how you'll solve customers' unmet needs). 

We would be offering customers an unbiased and completely objective, decentralized version of the news, in a language they could understand.

3)    Who are you offering it to? Describe, in as much detail as possible, the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your customers. Think especially of this question: what do your customers all have in common?

I'm offering this product to consumers aged 15-24, American, who are ideally either students or interested in current events. These customers are aware of the issues facing modern media corporations and want to truly understand what’s going on in the world.

4)    Why do they care? Your solution is only valuable insofar as customers believe its value to them. Here, explain why customers will actually pay you money to use your product or service. 

They care because right now there’s an ongoing “war on the media” or “war on fake news” people are becoming more and more aware of the journalistic flaws in major media corporations and are looking to truly understand what’s happening without the bias.

5) What are your core competencies? What sets you apart from everyone else? Also: what do you have that nobody else has? 

            What makes this project different is that this news outlet will be decentralized and extensively peer-reviewed, the articles must meet a certain # of peer approval to be published and the outlet doesn’t belong to a larger corporation so there's no incentive to try and falsify stories. What we have that no one else does is we stand independently from a larger business and have an audience involved peer-review style that sets a high standard for journalistic integrity.

There are some aspects of this business that are frankly out of calibration with the others. For example, monetization is still an issue for this idea. Thankfully the costs are very low so bootstrapping until revenue is stable could be an option. I need to work to revise the peer review process and figure out how to get middle ground readers. I don’t think most people are “extreme” enough to read exclusively CNN or Fox, most Americans lie somewhere in between either end of the spectrum and I think they’d pursue a version of the media that’s objectively less partisan. Now that I think about it, I should expand the target audience to be the middle ground of voters and consumers.