$10 Business Challenge - Journal Entry #1

For my Entrepreneurship class we have been tasked with the challenge of starting a business with $10.oo; Yes, a real business with only $10.00. This project, appropriately named the $10 Business challenge, has a few rules:

1. Business must be new and not a constitution of a previous or existing venture
2. Business must be legal and ethical
3. Business can be for-profit or non-for-profit
4. Additional funding for the business must come from business profits or Fundraising
5. For-profit business must maintain financial records
6. Non-for-profit business must verify social impact and will be primary assessed on extent of social impact

We are being asked to submit weekly journal entries and I thought it would be beneficial to post my entries for you all to read. Please feel free to give me feed back, suggestions, and your thoughts as I develop my $10.00 business!

Journal Entry #1

Since this assignment was given, I have been thinking non-stop about my options. To be honest, my first night home on winter break I literally lost sleep over this. We talked in class about how everyone has their personal "incubation" or "brainstorming" time when ideas just flow; for Dr. Smith it's in the shower… for me, it is when I am gearing down to fall asleep (which often leads to hours of thinking, and little sleep). So… here is what has been going on in my head.

Profit vs. Non-profit.

The issue with trying to start a profit business is I am a VERY busy individual. My idea for a profit business was to hand paint wine glasses upon customer requests. I recently painted a pair of martini glasses for my boyfriend's parents and they came out FABULOUS! However, it took me 4-5 hours to do both… and I just don't have that kind of extra free time. This got me thinking about what Dr. Smith said in class about starting a business based on something you would wake up and do on a Sunday anyway.

I absolutely love giving back and helping others! So naturally my immediate ideas centered on starting non-profit business. However, finding a way to show impact was tripping me up some. The conclusion I came to was, if I started some type of website and tracked users, I would know how many people are benefiting from my "business". But what to do…what to do?

Options:

1. Website - Hub of information for college women (similar to Linkedin and twitter but with a community service twist)

2. TRUTH (similar to the DARE program we all went through in middle school/HS but with a twist!)

It is important for me to focus on topics and issues that I am already heavily involved in or feel passion about so my next step is to do some additional research on these two ideas, and go from there!