SOPet PE2 Individual Report
Week 1–13
For this semester’s milestone, SOPetmainly focus on 4 things; first, start expanding the service to create an ecosystem for pets such as pet mall, second, partnering with other clinics, hospitals, and other services to make our services well-known, and third, generating more revenue and profit by expanding services and increasing basket size through improving the marketing strategies, and lastly, fully developing and pre-launching some basic features on the upcoming application. I will be focusing on the Petmall and partnership for the most part.
Our mentor this semester is P’Tim from UTC who we think will give great advice for SOPet’s future in techno field. For the first meet, P’Tim assigned us to make an airtable that set specific roles and tasks for all of us. So me and my team talked and got a conclusion that I will be focusing on petmall while Emiri focuses on marketing in general. There are a lot of partnership work that needs to be done during this semester and it is not easy to find connections to partner with a small startup company like SOPet.
The petmall platform will be in position soon since I have to wait for the UX/UI flow of the platform to be completed. But in the mean time, I am looking for partnership companies that might be interested in us. For instance, the LivingOS company or anything alike. But the problem with the LivingOS is that people in the LivingOS platform itself is also not using new features added in the platform. So it was hard to me to keep track of the users. This week, we had a discussion about the VBC Kit tech company that wants to partner with us as well.
For this week, I was assigned to do research and market survey on the salary that workers, in general, get because the UX/UI workload is overwhelming and it is not efficient to work by herself. Moreover, it would be much easier for the customers to pay via a payment gateway rather than transferring money every time they want a consultation. Therefore, i made contacts and research about payment gateway and how it is used. And this week, we entered the competition that professor Ronnie mentioned about.
I started on finding potential shops that could be in the Petmall, along with potential partners that could be our supplier in the future. There are many limitations as we cannot buy items and store it at home so we need suppliers that are willing to send out orders from us and also giving us a good price.
Next, I have concluded with the team that the payment gateway that we will be using is Money Space. The reason we chose money space is because the commission rate is cheap. There were many options around such as omise or 2c2p but both of them have great limitations and a more expensive commission rate if using creditcard. Yes, currently we do not need to use creditcards but after our petmall is launched, it would be easier for customers to use the payment gateway to pay for selected items in the petmall.
For the petmall, luckily there is a vet in our platform that has a clinic of her own. So we contacted her to be our supplier and the price that she gave us was reasonable. So we are in the progress of discussing about the shares. More over, the payment gateway company is almost finished as well. The only thing left is for us to gather information and then the gateway is ready to go.
