18 September 2018

Around 4:30pm, Cheryl, Cleo, Jia Xin, Ram and Shun Kai met one of the seniors from the previous Minor in Entrepreneurship batch, Jun Liang, who founded Tiebreaker with his team (Shiju was unable to join us because of internship). We asked him about his journey, how his working process was like and how his team handled their workload, their manpower, and their costs. We gained some valuable insight regarding our business idea, thanked him and we said goodbye around 5:30pm.

We adjourned for dinner and started discussing our own business idea. We realised that most groups from the previous batches stuff stayed away from ideas that were too time-consuming, manpower-heavy, or expensive, like food or delivery services or buy-and-sell (except Tiebreaker, which depended a lot on buy-and-sell as well as on personal connections). Instead, many of them did things that were relatively easy to DIY, and all of them had a Unique Selling Point.

At this point of time, reselling terrariums was one of the ideas we had in our list. Cleo suggested that we could try to target them at tourists, for example, using wire sculptures of landmarks in NTU like The Hive, or local landmarks like the Singapore Flyer or Gardens by the Bay. Cheryl commented that we could even make it general and include international landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Great Wall. This got the ball rolling, and we started throwing out ideas which slowly expanded to include other DIY products like decorative pieces made of wires, or mini wedding favours.

In the end, we decided to develop the terrarium idea even further due to its versatility. For example, we could start off with normal terrariums, suited for Singapore's climates. We would then perhaps expand to come up with a product line of mini landscapes of different climates/places. Or, we could go back to the sculpture/figurine idea and have iconic NTU/Singaporean landmarks in the terrariums for a more local flair.

We decided to research more about the plants and how we would create these terrariums, using which plants and which materials. We adjourned at 7pm and decided to share more when we regroup at our next meeting.