Growing My Social Capital

Domain Expert:

The person I chose for this slot, is Andy Norman. Andy is the Chief Executive Officer at Mobiquity, which is a leading app developer locate here in Gainesville. Andy fills the role of Domain Expert because he's put in a position daily about creating, promoting, and fulfilling the need for app-based business. I found Andy by researching local app developers, I figured this would be the best way to try and implement my idea. I talked with Andy on the phone, and asked if he'd take the time to view my elevator speech. He thought the idea wasn't terrible, but the specifics definitely needed to be improved upon. Being that Andy had to go through the same process I'll have to go through, I think he would be a great adviser to my endeavors.


Market Expert:

For this position, I chose to talk to Chris Harding. Chris also works for Mobiquity as the Executive Vice President for Business Development. Harding fills this spot perfectly, mostly because Mobiquity plays both the developer and the product sales role. Harding has to create market schemes and reviews customer reports to help future company projects. Just like Andy, I found Harding's contact info online at Mobiquity's website. I asked Harding to give me his opinion about my first elevator speech (arguably my best), and he actually really liked my idea and was encouraging me to develop more customer research and pursue the idea. Harding is he kind of person I'd love to have on my marketing team to get my app idea into the industry efficiently and effectively.

Supplier:

This was a surprisingly hard person to find because I didn't know if I should use an obvious choice (such as Microsoft or Apple) or use a company that would sell apps to them. I decided on Jack Zoldos, a sales rep/computer engineer for Apple. Zoldos' job involves buying/selling app-based technology from smaller companies, and then adapting them to Apple's services (even selling them on the App Store); I found Jack though a friend of mine who actually works at Apple as well. I presented my idea to him via my first elevator speech, which he responded pretty well with. Zoldos actually recommended a couple smaller companies that might be able to help me bring my idea into existence. I see Zoldos being the person I need to manage the flow information from any potential partner companies, as well as being the person I need to seek out potential, young companies.

Reflection:

This was a great experience, I'll definitely be using the methods I learned from it to help bring my idea to life. The people I talked to were much more understanding than I originally thought, I expected them to brush me off because they might think I was a just an annoying kid. However, they were very responsive and gave me good advice. The experience was a much more direct method than I'm used to when to comes to marketing, but I've learned that it might just be more effective and ambitious.