What Did It Cost?

Week of 1/17 - 1/24

After a week of planning our marketing strategies, my team and I have now entered the area of financial planning. Finance seemed intimidating at first because of how broad of a subject it was however, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. My team and I made a chart of all our startup finances and assessed three different categories: Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), Startup Costs, and Sales, General, and Administrative costs (SG&A). Our chart was split into these three different categories and with each one, we made a list of the money that we would need to spend in order to launch our startup and sustain it in the long term. There were many things that we had to focus on when considering the costs of everything in our startup that resulted in us leaving some things blank such as LLC costs, and factory costs since those costs are variable. I focused on the cost of the materials that it would take to build our product. I made a list of some of the materials we needed and researched the costs of these materials on different websites however, I believe that the materials needed for our product will change from time to time as we go deeper into developing our Minimum Viable Product. I also focused on the labor and equipment needed for developing our product however, finding accurate information was quite challenging and I know I will have to make many changes to this moving forward.

I felt like I grew this week and truly learned something new. Every week I do learn something new in my entrepreneurial journey, however, doing the finance charts for a startup taught me to never judge something by the way it looks. As I dug further into startup finances, the more I realized that it wasn't as hard as I initially thought. Was it still a challenge? Of course. But, in doing this chart I feel like I took a step forward and really learned something new rather than being intimidated by it based on what I perceived.

In the plan for the coming weeks, my team and I will start our minimum viable product development, a phase I think will be our greatest challenge yet, a phase that will be very enjoyable. I am looking forward to exploring the unseen paths in my journey and improving myself through my experience.