Today was my first meeting with the company I will be interning for; Matech Studios. I met with them at the University alongside the program director Alejandro Rojas in order to discuss what my internship will look like. The entire group was incredibly kind, even offering to speak in english, which sadly was refused by Alejandro. They began by giving a brief overview of who they were; mostly former coworkers who had branched off to form their own company and then others who had joined later. After introducing themselves and some of the general ideas of their company they became more specific about the actual product they were focusing on. They had come to the university as part of their "doing labs" incubator; a program within a university that partners the resources of the university with small local businesses in order to promote cooperation. After detailing their product more, an application designed to reduce food waste, they turned and asked me what it is I would be best at. In all honesty the question threw me off, not because it was a strange question but because within the context it was asked it was clear there was no right answer. I told them I loved economics and markets and found market research fascinating but that I also wanted to gain experience on the business / investment / development end. We talked more over the next 20 minutes as they detailed more about the app as well as their expectations for the program. I can confidently say this was one of the most adult conversations I have ever had, not because of the topic itself, but because everyone of them genuinely listened and seemed to care and respect what I had to say. Didnt do any real work this week though and they told me to hold off until next week to really jump into gear. All together though im excited and looking forward to see what theyll be having me do.

• This week we focused most of our meeting time on going over in greater detail what they want this app to looklike. While they have the basic outline of the application and an idea of where / how to focus it that seems to be just about all they have; names of the application were still being decided. The basic idea of the application is trying to solve the problem of "I am halfway through my week and I am running low on groceries... I dont want to spend unneccessary money on eating out... but I dont know what I can make with what little ingredients I have?". This problem; food waste based off of leaving those few chicken breasts or half an onion in your fridge for a week would be solved by the application automatically recommending your various recipes that would be healthy, tasty, and aslo use those leftovers. The task I worked on for the rest of the week was investigating the actual problem of global food waste; how much was wasted, where, and how. I spent the week doing a deep investigation on how food waste is wasted globally; in truth almost 1/3 of all food produced is wasted. This waste occurs at stages all along the production line but the two largest causes occur at the selection stage, when the factories pick which fruits to package and send out, and at the household level where previously mentioned types of waste occur. On one hand factories / manufacturers / producers throw out such a large quantity of food, especially produce, because of the high level of standards we have at the grocery store. Even though these cosmetic differences rarely have any effect on taste / nutritional value any food with blemish is immediately disposed of. This problem also varied based off the region and country; something that I will be keeping in mind when we starting investigating potential markets. In rich western nations, USA, Canada, or Korea for example food waste is usually higher but the majority comes from households; poorer nations on the other side waste food mostly on the production or shipping side where lack of resources mean poor conditions that lead to spoiled or damaged food. 

• This week we dove into what the application will be and the competitors it will face in the market. Due to the interesting nature of Food and Beverage applications, mainly that most of the successful apps are actually just delivery services, research on recipe focused applications required a lot of first person experience. This meant downloading over 20+ of the top available applications that I could find which seeemingly had similar functions. My research led me to discover that a great number of these recipe applications are just shells that actually are simply hosting web pages for the actual recipes, this means that I could just as easily google the recipe myself and get the same results. This also meant that one of the major issues we were hoping to solve from traditional online recipes, the giant blogs of backstory one is forced to scroll through to find the recipe, was a problem here as well. Another thing that became quickly apparent to me was the focus of these apps all seemed to be different, some apps targeted the recipes themselves like Yummly which compliled only the best possible recipes from around the world. Other apps like CookList focused more on the food management aspect; budgeting, dieting, meal planning, etc. were all at the center of the apps. There were other apps that had smaller more niche features such as some that allowed you to create a grocery list and instantaneously check prices among local stores through the app or other money saving features like coupons. Each of these apps had narrowed itself into doing just one part of the cooking process; something that seemed like a good idea on the supply side but absolutely terrible on the demand side. From there I investigated to the best of my ability the downloads, sales, and other metrics measuring the success of these apps. From there I confirmed my hypothesis that the most successful of these apps CookList, AllRecipes, etc. were offering a basic free level of service that functioned almost identical to any standard recipe website. Additionally and crucially they were also offering a premium tier for subscribers and this is where the money is made and where the real functionality exists. By paying for this higher tier users gained access to a full suite of features that included meal planning, recipe generation, ingredient "storage", truly all you need to ensure you're cooking healthy and affordable meals. This research provided an excellent description and image of what the market looked like and would inform a lot of the rest of the process.

This week I doubled down in my research and "brainstorming" for MindFud and began focusing on the monetization models of other competitors in the F&B sector as well as those of generic applications. My research quickly led to understanding that most applications today follow a similar model of "freemium". There are still apps that cost an upfront fixed cost, many of them are feature packed or productivity focused such as Pages, Photo-editing tools, or other similar applications with clear function and use. However it is much more common and often much more successful to go with the free or freemium monetization models, this is because a free app will garner exponentially more downloads and "word of mouth" than one that costs even $0.99. Within free or freemium apps there are even more options in terms of monetization strategies. Many social media applications opt for the "free with ads" strategy where everything is free but advertising is 24/7. Other applications use in-app-purchases or subscriptions to hide certain features behind a paywall, apps such as Tinder, Duolingo, Youtube, or many more; certainly this style of freemium application is the most ubiquitous. After all the research I did this week though I can say with a lot of confidence that Mindfud is perfect for a freemium style of application. This would allow us to offer features to all free users that allow them to get the basics from the app; recipe generation, food waste reduction, and more. Yet it would also offer a higher tier from which most if not all of our initial revenue would come and it would provide steady month over month returns so long as subscribers kept their account. Over the long term I also began to envision the integration of ads into the application as a massive source of revenue, if local stores or even major chains had partnered with the application they could easily use it much like a newspaper in order to publish coupons. Say a local grocery store has too many apples this week and is a partner on Mindfud, they could go into the app and offer a "buy one get one free" deal on apples! To take it a step further, say Walmart has a surplus of 10000 cans of corn, they could pay as a sponsor to promote recipes with corn to everyone on the app while offering discounts! Forget newspapers or tvs, advertising sales at the grocery stores through those mediums requires that the consumer remembers your ad from the time they watch / read it all the way to their arrival at the grocery store. With Mindfud being the app you use to meal plan and grocery shop already it allows advertising directly at the point of purchase. 

This week I investigated in detail the features of the most successful food and beverages applications in order to compare them against potential ideas the team had for the app. I investigated many of the original competitiors I had identified in the market as well as a few additional programs I had "discovered" in the interim. My findings luckily confirm that of all these applications none of them truly are able to do what the team wants with their app. There are some that have intelligent recipe recommendation, some with "pantry" modes where food can be inventoried, some where you can plan meals for the week, and others where you can order food directly or see options in local stores. But importantly, there was no app that was able to do it all. Most apps seemed to chose and focus on either the recipe side, health side, or the food waste / money saving side. This presents a massive opportunity within the market (luckily) for the team to enter with the new app. It was great being able to share with them my findings and they found it just as interseting as I did, there clearly was a gap in the market and the demand was there as well. Clearly people wanted apps that could do these things; the top apps in the category had millions of downloads, but it was also clear to me after using over 20 different apps that none of them seemed able to efficiently do what i wanted. More importantly than that though; the only app that seemed to get close had locked it behind a $4 monthly paywall; which I personally quickly identified as a massive barrier to success for these apps. Another key feature that many apps seemed to use that I found highly unappealing was using 3rd party recipes; within the app when a recipe was selected it just loaded an external web page where the recipe was originally. This annoyed me tremendously as one of the universal complaints of recipe-blogs (where a majority of recipes are sourced from) is that there are unnecessary paragraphs of background info before the dish begins as well as cumbersome ads. 

This week I continued with my investigation into potential monetization models however this time focusing even more on potential B2B opportunities for the application. By examining some of the products I had already encountered in my research as well as other general practices of advertising and marketing food and beverage products I was able to find a massive gap in the market that MindFud would easily fill. Some of the best recipe applications already allowed you to create a grocery list of simple items and then export that list to a major chain such as Kroger's, Walmart, Etc. and they would then provide you with items at those stores that match your list. However the application that does this the best Cooklist, does not offer in app recipes nor a whole boat load of other key features. This means that once again this application has streamlined itself and by doing so made itself inherently less valuable, sure the features that remain work perfectly but if I have to exit your cooking / recipe /meal planning application to go to another application for part of that process, Why am I even using your app? This is to say that once people do not need your application or do not get value from it they will no longer use it. This is why I thought it was so crucial that Mindfud includes all these stages of the cooking processs from purchasing, to preparation, to storage and disposal, and do it all within the app. If this could be accomplished it would give Mindfud unrivaled "real estate" in the minds of consumers for advertisers, no one else would be that intricatly linked with consumption. If you saw an ad just while looking for a recipe online you'll likely ignore it, but if you are on the app trying to figure out what to cook and Mindfud tells you "Oh with xyz ingredients you can make this pasta dish! Hey next time if you get abc ingredient you can make it even better, Walmart has them on sale right now want me to ad to your shopping list?" and just like that you have been advertised to and sold a product. Mindfud has the potential to be an incredibly effective advertiser because of the value we recieve from food. If you purchase a product from an advertisement on Amazon you likely will receive some value from it, but you might not. You might feel as though this product is pointless, or doesn't work, or only works in specific situations all of which could reduce your willingness to purchase advertised products in the future. Food however is different. If you buy a special Thai Curry sauce becasue it was advertised to you as something to give a kick to your chicken, you put it on your next meal and eat it. Sure you might not like the flavor but it is still food, you bought it and consumed it. Food is not re-usable, it is very much finite and that makes it already a much easier product to advertise successfully. All of this is to say that after all my research I feel like the opportunities Mindfud provides B2B are massive and could generate much more revneue than just the subscriptions however those ad campaigns depend entirely on Mindfud having a large enough user base so they will only be possible in the long term.

This week I took a break from my work with MindFud to begin the early stages of market research on another project for the team, their Crypto-backed ticketing application called Memento. Their idea was to take the technology of the blockchain that powers NFTs in order to creat Non-Fungible-Tickets which would allow artists to set prices for the resale of their tickets as well as crucially eliminate the plague of bots which have artificially inflated ticket prices around the world. This research eventually led me to a few small groups of companies all with a very similar idea. Initially this led me to dismay at the thought that something that had sounded revolutionary when the team had mentioned it, was in fact clearly not unique. However upon more investigation it became clear that many of these companies claiming to have the new model of how ticketing would work, were actually simply using the same core technology. DEFY, GUTS, and Wicket are 3 of the top companies in this sector with already over 500,000 tickets sold but they all use GET Protocol. GET Protocol is actually used by many similar companies now as they primarily license out their software to other businesses allowing them to do the actual sales of the tickets. What this meant however is that these smaller businesses, especially due to tight competition with Ticketmaster in the US, have all focused on smaller markets in order to sell more tickets. Some of these companies focused on a particular genre of Music while others focused on a particular region, both of these approaches allowed for a greater demand from the consumers as they already had fewer options than a massive national audience. This meant that Memento could easily become the NFT ticketing option for Latin America or just Argentina and by focusing on local shows and events could generate a much more loyal base of both users buying tickets as well as vendors or venues willing to use the service. The venue side of this equation is unquestionably "where the sausage gets made" as it is how most of these ticketing websites such as Ticketmaster or Stubhub are able to create monopolies by having venues sign exlusivity contracts with them. By following this less than ethical pattern (or something similar) Memento could easily establish itself as an effective and cheap alternative to the problems found with many traditional ticketing systems.

This week we returned to Mindfud and the application and did more work trying to drive home the most important features in the app and creating a preliminary vision of what the two levels of paid and free applications will look like. This involved even more market research across a broad spectrum of applications to try and find those that used this preemium model the most effectively. One of the key examples I found in my research was actually an application I had used during high school frequently, one which I had personally paid to upgrade to its premium version. This app, ArtStudio was for all intents and purposes a PhotoShop lite for the Iphone or Ipad, except it was only "lite" when it was in the free version. In fact the premium version had a wide array of the same tools that one would have to now pay $20 a month for when using Photoshop through Adobe. This demonstrated perfectly for me the balance between enough free features to attract consumers, all while always keeping the most advanced features out of reach. You could certainly use the app for free and get good results, but if you wanted to truly use the full potential of the app it required a purchase upgrade. This example did have one major flaw however, it was a one time purchase and not the subscription method we had settled on. I dont think we should ignore it but it certianly is less applicable than other apps. Discussing the features we watned to be free we established that anything involving Recipes, Meal Planning, or Grocery Lists would be the free features of the app as they were all things that could be easily done just without ever involving an application. There would be a basic version of the smart food waste AI, the main selling point of the app, included in the free version but much of the more advanced information and functions would be behind the subscription paywall. These advanced features we discussed all centered on the main value add of the app, that a smart AI will be able to intelligently recommend you recipes based off of what ingredients you have in your cabinets. Features such as the ability to scan and upload ingredients and products obtained via a reciept from the grocery store make this process even easier than having to hand input every single condiment or vegetable in your fridge. 

This week I focused on devleoping a growth model for Mindfud specifically focusing on what market demographics we would want to target and establishing a framework for how the business would grow. I found through research that while this app would likely have broad appeal, at least one member of every household is going to be cooking food at some point every week, the premium tier users would likely be a much more narrow section of the population. For this reason I found that our initial focus of marketing should be highlighting three facets of the app that all compliment each other; 1) Reduction or elimination of food waste by ensuring leftovers are always used 2) A healthy diet thanks to meal planning and health conscious recipes and 3) Saving money through in-app coupons or simply by reducing food waste and therefore overall purchasing. These three facets all work with each other, it is the reduced food waste and meal planning that helps you to save money, money which can be used to purchase healthier and better ingredients. Our primary demographics for the app would be those with disposable income but split between distinct age groups; one would be young professionals or university students who would need the app to teach them meal planning, budgeting, as well as thousands of healthy and tasty recipes. The second and arguably larger and more important demographic would be adults with families and children who would see the app as a life (and wallet) saving alternative to the age old question of "I dont know what I can cook with what I have in the house". Usually that line of thinking ends in takeout or some form of buying 3rd party meals, which are as a general rule more expensive than just a home cooked meal. We discussed during our meetings one of the feature that we had seen in some of the recipe apps, a form of social network, and realized this too would be an important aspect of Mindfuds devleopment. By allowing a user to post their own recipes, share or like the recipes of others, and even "follow" accounts whose recipes they liked, we would create a natural environment of growth that gives users a sense of conncetion and community which would only encourage even more development. Our first stage in the growth model would be a limited geographic release of the app; the area would need to be high income as that allows users the extra cash to pay for a subscription but also increases the likelihood of local quality food. Within this limited relase, say 1 city, we would be able to find and partner with local food vendors and offer them a direct method of adveritsing to local consumers. It is crucial that we establish this network of both loyal consumers and reliable vendors before any form of significant growth can happen. Without local options to purchase ingredients the "life cycle" of the app becomes much more unsustainable, of course people may still use the app for recipes or meal planning or to reduce food waste, but the second we lose the coupons and products of local vendors we break the loop that we need to keep costumers in if we want to justify a premium subscription. Once we had established limited areas where we saw success with the app we would be able to increase more and more rapidly at which point we would enter the second stage of the growth model. Once >5 locations had been shown to succesfully incorporate the app we would begin a true marketing campaign, up until this point marketing would be limited as it would only have to be on a location by location basis. Once the app began to expand to more and more cities though we would use Food Influencers as our main source of marketing. This is due to the relatively low cost of sponsored ads, especially among food influencers, than say a TV or Radio ad spot; additionally these influencers would allow us to hyper focus on the two demographics mentioned previously. One set of influencers would be young professionals and students who focused on their age group and highlighting the time and money saving features of the app while the others would be family influencers who would target other families to highlight again the time and money saving features of the app. While both sets of influencers would technically highlight the same features, the presentation and application of those features would be wildly different.

This week I worked to develop a Pitchdeck for an upcoming meeting with a few potential investors, the entire team, as well as the liason of the university. This pitchdeck essentially boiled down what I had been working on for the previous 2 months into just a few slides. It took me a bit of research to ensure that I had a solid understnading of what a pItchdeck should look like beyond what I had learned in University.  After that I quickly began putting together the pitchdeck and adapting it to best fit what we wanted to show from Mindfud. Some of the slides I found relatively easy given as things such as competition, value add, what the market looked like and more, I had already researched and had a very good idea of what they would look like. I did run into slightly more significant trouble when it came to things such as the financials behind the application, not due to any lack of knowledge on finance so much as a complete lack of available data. Without any data on Mindfud, sales, downloads, etc. it was near impossible to develop a truly well founded idea of what the finances looked like. My solution was to do more research on the industry and compare it with similar apps; using this and then low-balling significantly I came away with figures that I felt were realistic and could easily be accurate. I included as well a brief mockup of the potential balance sheet and income statement from the first year of operation. I used industry averages for advertising costs, development costs, as well as the average downloads, subscriptions, and revenue per subscriptions for similar applications. Aside from these slightly invented financials however the rest of the pitchdeck was well founded in the discussions and research I had conducted over the previous few weeks; market size, opportunity, traction, the team, and much more of the key elements of the ptichdeck were the exact focuses I had over previous weeks. This allowed me to craft a professional level pitchdeck, and more importantly it allowed me to sit in on the potential investor meeting and deliver informed consultation and analysis. While the rest of the team was more than capable of explaining the technical features of the app and its "Why", it was up to me to deliver the information behind the business side of the application; what did the market look like, competitors, key demographics, rough valuation, revenue models, and more. I truly have never experienced before working in an environment where my word was so highly valued and respected, although I was just an intern and not even from that country, everyone in that meeting showed me the same respect as an expereinced professional. It was this moment that truly centered my focus on pursuing a line of work where I could continue this work, consulting and advising businesses to help them achieve their goals was something I found beyond satsifying. 

This week I circled back to Memento, the NFT ticketing platform that Matech Studios was hoping to create. While my first round of research had revealed that this market, while not overcrowded yet, was certainly not completely open either. There seeemed to be more than a handful of ticketing platforms already in existence, some of which listed major A list acts on their websites as clients who used the NFT tickets. My reserch and analysis this week however was focused on the business models that many of these platforms used, something I suspected would be largely similar across the industry. My suspicion for this was confirmed as I found that a majority of these platforms were actually using the fundamental "source code" of one firm; GET Protocol. Many of these businesses had liscensed the GET Protocol technology which they paid a fee for all while using it as their underlying technology for their respective platforms. Each of these businesses found revenue in the same ways; primarily by taking a fractional percentage of initial ticket purchases but also by establishing paid partnerships with venues that wanted to gaurantee ticket sales. These two forms of revenue generation go largely unnoticed by the consumer (just look at ticketmaster controverseries) as all they see is one combined ticket price, they do not see the percentage the platform takes or the amount the venues are paying the platforms. With this in mind the business model for the NFT ticketing application was quite clear, what still remained unclear however was whether or not the team would need to liscense this GET protocol or if they would try and create their own platform. Both options held advantages and disadvantages but given the size of team, as well as the unique market they had access to in Argentina, i recommended that simply licensing the technology would be a far less costly endeavour. The primary reasoning I had was that NFTs at the moment are incredibly popular however that could change within a matter of hours, this meant that long term investment into NFT technology was a rather risky choice. Far easier would be to purchase the GET protocol, with GET the creation of a ticketing platform would be infinitely easier than building one from scratch. Once the platform was operational the only step remaining (that hopefully had already been completed) would be to form partnerships with local venues that wanted to use the platform. The advantage to the venue would be 1) that they could advertise themselves as "scam-free" venues that guaranteed its customers would not have to face bots that bought out all the tickets and 2) to get their tickets advertised and marketed on a much larger scale then they would be able to accomplish themselves, helping to ensure ticket sales stay high. Additionally these venues would benefit from another large selling point of NFT tickets, that they encourage repeat attendance and loyalty. Most of my analysis and research remained rather surface level as the team made it clear this was more of a back-burner idea, something I found only reinforced my notion that purchasing the GET protocol would be near free money. Once venue partnerships were established simply purchasing the GET protocol would allow for a much quicker implentation of the NFT platform and substantially increase the chance that it could still "ride the NFT wave". The worst possible scenario would be for the team to dedicate themselves to the potentially years long development cycle only to end it well after NFTs have become unpopular or even worse: regulated.

This week contained very little new work as I spent nearly all of it reviewing my presentations and research and "debreifing" with the team. We discuessed my future and what careers I would like to get into, as well as what they hope to see Matech look like in the future. While I highly doubt any job opportunities would ever materialize within Matech anytime soon, given as their total number of employees is 6, they did discuss several larger international firms both in Argentina and the USA that I should investigate. It was a truly amazing experience working alongside the Matech team, and one that I will forever cherish as my first true time working alongside peers in the professional world. The knowledge I gained from working hands-on with a startup provided me with an excellent foundation which I am confident I can use in my career. This time truly cemented within me the career path I wish to embark upon; I want to be in a position to advise and assist those around me to help them achieve their goals. I have a passion for learning and problem solving and this line of work aboslutely satisfied both; I was forced to do hours upon hours of research into fields I had almost zero prior knowledge of. To many this may seem tedious but to me it was fascinating, every time I am able to gain more knowledge I feel as though I gain insight into an entirely new part of the world I never even knew existed. I finished the week off in our final meeting by doing a complete review of the proposals, presentations, and advice I had delivered over the past 3 months. It was truly an inspiring experience watching these professional adults record my thoughts and suggestions and ask questions, provide feedback, and just give me more respect than I had ever experienced before.