On the second day of Academic Working Capital 2017 Workshop II, about 70 students from the 28 participating groups learned about the program’s purchasing system, attended lectures on sales and operation and continued working on improving their solutions. The activities of July 18th were focused on refining the products in Design Sprint sessions with colleagues and on maturing the business and commercial vision. Workshop II takes place in the classrooms and auditorium of the Mechanical and Naval Engineering building of the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo (USP), in São Paulo-SP.
Check out the first day of AWC 2017 Workshop II
During the morning, the groups gathered in the clusters and participated in a flipped classroom on the experiments test. They also did the “hats exercise”, in which they defined the roles of each member of the group, noticing the critical points of the product and business. The purpose of the activities was to enhance Deck 2 – Testing the Solution.
The first lecture of the day was from the partner of the consultancy CAOS Focado Miguel Chaves, who talked about the financial system of AWC. He showed the students how the budgeting process and the purchase order approval work – through it, the groups buy the materials needed to assemble the prototype. Miguel invited this year’s groups which had already bought their materials to share their experiences with colleagues. “This is the opportunity for you to show if you really learned the concepts of the program”, said Havilah Vasconcelos Ramos, from Horus group.
AWC content coordinator, Diogo Dutra, told the groups that this workshop is extremely product-focused, but that students also need to start developing their “business look”. After all, there are groups that closed their first sale without a finished product, as it is the case of A Hole Map. For Diogo, groups will need to split tasks, take a critical look at the business, and, if necessary, even call in more members.
The subject continued being discussed in the lecture of the first external guest of this workshop, Guilherme Ruggiero, head commercial of the startup Colaboradores. The focus of the lecture was sales: how to go from zero clients to 1 client, and from 1 client to 10 clients. “You are the vendors. You are the entrepreneurs, but you are also the vendors for a long time”, he said. “An entrepreneur has to be selling all the time.” Guilherme talked about what students can do to win their first customers, suggested good practices and tools, explored concepts and highlighted that, at the end of the day, what makes a good vendor is discipline and organization.
The lecture by Infoprice co-founder and head of Technology and Product, Marcos Roggero, focused on operation. Marcos spoke about Infoprice, talking about the beginning of the startup, the problems they had and stories of success and failure. “The operation on day 1 is ‘go there, do and learn’, it is not ‘go there, do and forget’; ‘go there, do and cling to the hypothesis that you thought it was true and that is a lie’.” Marcos said that, in the beginning, it is difficult to sell the same thing to the same customer, especially in the B2B segment. He also explained that there is no use in wanting to make innovation with a completely bureaucratic structure. Students asked questions at the end of the lecture, especially on patents.
After the lectures, the groups returned to the classrooms to continue working on the deck and on the presentation they will make tomorrow, on the third and last day of Workshop II, at the Intermediary Fair.
