Closing Remarks (We do not go further for e-bid and e-procurement business)

We decided not to continue our project our business and not to convert our idea into business for the following reasons:

If we check the companies that enter the e-bid business, we will see that only big companies has been successful. The examples in Turkey clear this comment. Overall 4 companies are there in the sector and Koç Company and Sabancı Company are the leading ones. They are also two of the ten biggest company in Turkey. I sense from the interview with Uğur Güntekin that even Koç Promena is struggling in the market. In Portugese, 20 construction company and 1 telecom company got together and founded an online procurement and online bid system. That tells me how much investment budget, market connections, experiences and market credibility we need to start up. These requirements exceeds capacity of start-up companies. The sector of online procurement and online bidding is not appropriate for start-ups.

We have to make a deal with procurement departments of companies. They have to demand or we should be able to create demand to sell our product. However; guys in procurement departments are not well educated. Only 10% of them, according to Uğur Güntekin, are educated from related departments of universities or has bachelors degree. Therefore they are not aware of needs of modern world and they do not believe the benefits of an web based application. They may trust more in their classical methods. The 90% obstructs our way.

As we mentioned in our early post about the interview with Ugur Guntekin, consulting service is a necessity to be able to reach the real potential of system. Unfortunately, it needs  a lot of experience and budget that we lack. Additionally, there are powerful competitors that dominate the market such as Promena and Intengo. 7 of 14 automotive firms in Turkey that we listed on blog work with Promena and 1 of them works with Intengo.

Not going behind the idea is an answer also; this result is OK for us. Process is more essential than the results for this course and we learned a lot in this process.

Thanks GOB, Thanks Michael Goldberg.

FINAL PRESENTATION

THE LAST CANVAS

OUR VIDEO

Let's watch our professional video with great acting, sound editing, video editing and visual effects :)  I do not know whether you like the video or not; but we did have so much fun while preparing it.We filmed a summary of our process with advices of Michael Goldberg, and what we learned from the course and interviews.

Interview with Mehmet Ziya Telli (Efekan Güven)

The last interview of GOB team is with Mehmet Ziya Telli. He works for IBM for 25 years. He was country manager for 13 years and currently head of client representatives in Ankara. There are more titles he had in IBM which I forgot. I talked him about in other post before; lets cut it out here :)

He is familiar with student projects since he mentored so many projects of CTIS students. He took canvas from my hand and started to read it word by word and corrected even the grammatical mistakes he saw. We added solution architect to key partners. We aimed customization as revenue; therefore someone from us has to offer solutions to unique customer problems. That is why we need solution architects. We change the term cash to investment budget and added market intelligence to key resources. He put key resources in a queue. In addition to that, we used the term of competition rather than rivalry.

Another important point is the change in the perspective of lower prices. Rather than lower prices, we have to offer lower price/(performance+conditions). Because price is not the only parameter that our customers evaluate. They also look at quality, production certificates, CE norm, shipment, shipment duration, payment conditions, etc. Lets summarize them as price/(performance+conditions). In addition to that, we should not forget the queue of marketing, sales and channels.

There is no need to tell other points of interview, not to fall into repetition.

Efekan Güven

LinkedIn Account

Here is LinkedIn account of our start-up company: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=271227531&authType=name&authToken=61DL&trk=wvmx-profile-title

It will be used to reach potential customers.

Interview with Marketing Manager of Coca Cola Ankara (Cem ÖMEROĞLU)

Last Monday, I made an interview with Reşat Yavuz who is the marketing manager at Coca Cola in Ankara. He worked  at Public Procurement Agency for two years. Since he has two year experience in the sector, we think, he would help us a lot. However, he gave advice to us to not enter the sector with such a project. He said that, every organization and big company like Coca Cola already has this kind of system and all most all of them are updating the system on alternate days. By doing so, they try to keep up with technological developments. He said that there are already millions of project like GOB in the market. The market is really huge and it is required a great experince and huge capital in order to compete in the sector. Therefore, GOB will not be as successful as you'd expect. Thus, put it into trash."