the second time around. scheduling a follow-up prior to everyone leaving for winter break was a bit tricky, but eventually they had the mtg and the dean was there, his director of IT, the entrpreneurship / small business professor, and a designated liason to the b school for the syl labeye project.

cam did the demo for them with some test syllabi, and it worked perfectly. they were very impressed with the functioning of the app as well as the implications for them (increased productivity for professors due to less time dealing with student excuses for late / missed assignments or problems w/ deadlines).

the best part of the whole thing is that in the beginning the dean presented to the other people from the b school and HE ran off the talking points, almost verbatim. in particular, he said that he was taking a kind of, 'ok, we'll get to it ' attitude, and was going to put off the meeting until january, but that's before cameron explained to him that the half-life of an app based business is much shorter than traditional businesses, and that in this case, first mover advantage (our catchphrase to explain why we needed to move urgently) was of utmost importance in allowing them to gain a foothold, and grab marketshare in advance of any future competition.

that could not have gone better if we'd scripted it.

cam walked out of the meeting with a prof who committed to pilot it to his class of over 500 students (and who would redo his syllabus to match our template). another person would start work on a study (to capture various metrics to measure the efficacy of syll abeye : number of missed assignments, number of zeros, grade average, etc) so that we would end up with some hard data to give the university. and another would serve as the liason to the b school for any issues. AND, if the rollout in january to the 500 students (which would include a 3 min presentation by cam in their big lecture hall on use of the app) went well, they'd roll it out to the whole b school in February.

so now cam and mikal are going to the other schools on campus (engineering, nursing, urban planning, etc), to get more folks on board.


in the meantime, we got to kick the marketing and everything into full gear. meaning getting press releases out, blasting social media, and setting up our street team approach for campus peer marketing. on that one, we don't have a big budget, so its gonna take some faith on the part of other students to give this thing an initial push until it gains enough momentum that we can prime the pump with revenues.


peace & blessings,

x.

www.twitter.com/poetx

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I'm an advocate for working smarter, not harder. If you just
focus on working hard you end up making someone else rich and
not having much to show for it. (c) mad