Business Proposal

By Ho Ying Lo (Jane)

Jinyang Luo (Regina)Yedi Luo

Cho Yan Tong Hung Mei Tsoi

1. The BitMorning, China! provides an efficient Chinese breakfast pick out service on campus. The breakfast meal option on campus is very limited and most of the restaurants open around 11:30 o’clock. Thus, It is extremely hard for student who has early class in the morning to find efficient breakfast after class in the morning, particular, Chinese student with different diet habits. Therefore, we provide an easy-reach Chinese breakfast pick-up service on campus.

2. The ModelMorning, China! is a third-party company that provides Chinese breakfast delivery/pick-up service to Chinese students, who are our target customers, on weekdays (Monday through Friday). Morning, China! is the delivery medium between the B (business: the Chinese restaurants) to C (customers). We are going to co-operate two companies which are our breakfast providers: Xiaotongyunwei and Xibei Soymilk for providing special Chinese breakfast dishes to be available selling in our website.

Customers will use our website to choose the breakfast pick-up time; and they choose the Chinese breakfast choice a night before picking up their meals. In addition, we provide an efficient online payment method. After they pay for their meals, they will get a notice about their breakfast choice, pickup time and location from our website and email. Customers need to show us the email or a printed notice to get their prepaid Chinese breakfast.

Our main profit will come from selling Chinese breakfast in our online platform. Moreover, we will reach our customer through advertising among the Chinese student organizations, such Husky Help and CSSA.

3. The Customer & The Market

Market:To reach our target customer, we have identified our Total Available

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Market (TAM), Segmented Addressable Market (SAM) and our Share of the Market (SOM). Students who are studying at the University of Washington are our TAM. Asian students at the University of Washington are our SAM. For SOM, the Chinese International students who are the ones we will realistically reach. The table below shows how we find the number of students in SAM and SOM based on the overall student population at the University of Washington (See Table 1 below for detailed calculation).

Table 1: Number of students in SAM and SOM

Undergrads

UW overall population 100% 31,100

Segmented Addressable Market (out of UW overall population, approximately):

International student 15.60% 4851.6

International Chinese student

70.50% 3420.378

International Taiwanese 7.20% 349.3152

Asian American 28.70% 1392.4092

Total SAM: 5162.1024

Customers: Our primary customers are Chinese international students who are studying at the University of Washington. Most of the Chinese students are undergraduate students. Their incomes are mostly from family support. International student pays twice more than the original local student for tuition fee. Thus, they have certain quantifiable disposable money from their parents. Most of the Chinese students do not have a job or either the Visa issue pushes them to only capable of gaining a job inside school. Some

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of them are working part-time on campus because of the student visa restriction that international students cannot work outside of the school. Since most of them are international students, it takes time for them to adapt into a new living place. While in the process of adapting the American culture, they still miss their home country’s culture.

In order to let them refresh Chinese cultures in the United States, we are going to provide Chinese breakfast for them after considering their lifestyles and beliefs:

● Chinese students miss home’s food:- Although they can have Chinese food in different Chinese restaurants in

the University District, there is no option for them to try Chinese breakfast on campus and around the campus area since Chinese restaurants are usually opened after 10 o'clock. So the only breakfast options are mainly American style such as sandwich, coffee, waffles and so on.

● Some of the students are lack of time to prepare breakfast before class:- Sometimes, they do not have enough time to prepare breakfast before

they go to school in the morning. They may need to rush their time to take the bus on time. Thus, they skip eating breakfast as they do not have sufficient time to cook it in the morning before school. Nevertheless, the students would love to eat breakfast before their first class in the morning if time is available

● Most of the students do not prefer to cook by themselves:- Since students usually eat breakfast by themselves only, they do not care

whether they eat breakfast at home or outside. In addition, they prefer to sleep for a longer time, rather than spending some of their sleeping time to prepare for their breakfast due to the heavy pressure of school work. Therefore, they prefer to eat breakfast if someone prepares breakfast for them and they do not need to prepare the cooking materials.

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Customer’s Persona:

Ming is a Chinese International student who majors in CSE (computer science engineer) and have been at the University of Washington for two years. His life is very busy with school work, like big capstone project and his own startup idea. As the only child in his family due to Single Child policy in China, he doesn’t know how to cook and he normally eats outside. This quarter, he got an early class start at 8:30 in the morning. Not to mention his busy life with staying in the lab nearly everyday. It's extremely hard for him to find a good place to eat breakfast either on campus on in University Avenue. The range for choosing a place to eat was particularly small. He would either eat in HUB or go Starbucks to grab a butter croissant. He really wants to have some Chinese style breakfast, which is easy for him to pick out and pay on campus. Here comes Morning, China!

Method of reaching the customers:

Our target customers are studying at the University of Washington. And they will be in the University District as the district is close to the campus. Therefore, we can find the customers on campus and in the University District.

To reach them, we will use social media mainly as our target customers use social media frequently. In order to know customers’ preferences, we created an online survey and gave it to Chinese students through Facebook (by posting on student organizations/ school’s official fan page and groups). Furthermore, we will make posters and flyers, and distribute it on campus such as in the Quad or Red Square since these places have the most students to pass by. Additionally, we have already created a website with QR code scan for students to pre-order their breakfasts online; and we will have a breakfast pick up spot on campus for students to pick up their prepaid breakfast.

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Competitive Ecosystem:

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As for the delivery service, our main competitors were mainly the food delivery online platform. Either they would provide the off line delivery service (charge for the delivery fee), or they would cooperate with the restaurant who has already the food delivery service. However, compare with our pre-ordered breakfast service. We provide the most efficient in time delivery service for the student to pick out on campus directly before or after class (at the time they selected ahead). Additionally, the delivery time for these companies were normally around 60min to 90 min. Compare with our pre-order strategy, student don't have to wait. Similar pre-order strategies were also used in Peach, a new start up founded by one of the Amazon's Pre-employee, mainly focus on the lunch pre-order and delivery for large companies. As for the price point, Morning China is the lowest among them all due to the breakfast service were slightly cheaper than other meals among throughout the day (See Table 2 below for more details in the comparison between Morning, China! and other competitors).

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Table 2: Comparison between Morning, China! And other competitors

Target customer Time period

Own delivery service

Delivery fee

Morning, China!

UW Chinese Student

Morning 8:30am-10: 30am

Pre-order; pick-time delivery Free

Colorful menu Asian in Seattle

All day 10:30am-10: 30pm 60min

15% of the order price or above

Peach delivery

Amazon & Microsoft Asian Employee

Lunch 12:00pm-12: 30pm

Pre-order pick time delivery Free

Meiwei Delivery Asian in Seattle

Night 6:00pm-1:00am 60min

Free over 20$

Amazon Local

Anyone who need delivery service

Based on the restaurants’ opening hours 60min

Depends on types of restaurants

4. Social ProofIn order to understand how our service can help our target customers, we conducted an online survey, which is given to the University of Washington’s students and interviewed

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10 Chinese students. Since we hope to see the market’s preference, we avoid giving out the survey to our friends. By giving the survey and interviewing our potential customers, we get to know more about the customers’ tastes and habits. In addition, we discovered that our service is desirable in our Share of the Market (SOM).

By analyzing the results of the online survey and interviews, we found that online surveys and interviews have similar results. But we understand more about the customers by talking directly to them. Overall, all interviewers love Chinese food. If they have a chance try Chinese breakfast at school, they are willing to do the online pre-ordered payment one day before they pick-up their ordered meal.

In the survey, we got 116 responses. There are 76 responses from our target customers (53 responses from Chinese students and 23 responses from Chinese-American students). We found that 72% of students have tried Chinese breakfast. And all of them like it. For the remaining 28% of students, they didn’t try Chinese breakfast before. All of them except one student would like to try a Chinese breakfast. Furthermore, if they can do an prepaid online order one day before picking up their meal on campus, 92% students are willing to do so and want to purchase for the meal. For the remaining 8%, they will not buy it because they prefer to eat at home and depend on the price and quality. However, these factors would not affect our sales because we found that the majority of the Chinese students would pay for our service.

To let the Chinese students to pick up their pre-ordered breakfast easily on campus, we will set some pick-up spots in Red Square, the Quad and the HUB yard as most our responders choose these place. And these places have the most students to pass by on campus. Based on the responders’ willingness of price charging and our evaluation of the cost of good sold, will set Chinese meal below $7. Moreover, the most popular items based on the survey result are soymilk, buns, congee, Onigiri and noodles. We will provide these popular items in our Chinese breakfast pre-order options; and find some more delicious Chinese breakfast food items by negotiating with Chinese restaurants. (See Appendix: Exhibit 3 for the summary of responses)

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5. Financial Metrics & “Descriptive Financials”

Morning China is asking for a starting amount equal to $2150. The $2150 includes operations costs ($1200) for a period of three weeks, $200 cost of containers for further customer’s orders, $250 dollars for beverage’s cups, and would include a $500 buffer in case for any unforeseen cost should arise. Our operation costs include promotions and everything prepared for the meals, which are advertisings, food sampling, equipment, and gas for delivering. As we estimate the costs and it is not the true number, so we would allow a small buffer in case for any unexpected situations. Morning China is a company that provided breakfast delivering service for students at the campus. We would like our customers to know the value that we bring to them. We provide more choices of breakfast for our customers at the campus, and also, it is convenient to our customers as we provide a pick up service, so they can enjoy their food before they go to class or after class. Because of the value of our company, we will sell each order at $10 in average, which will allow us to gain a profit start at week 3, that also means our break-even point will be by the end of week two. In order to meet our goal, we must sell to a minimum of 225 orders in two weeks. The appendix will help us to explain where we got the numbers of customer and how we need the $2150 funds.

6. Safe Harbor Page

Most people would like to have breakfast before they go to work or go to class. There is a great opportunity for us to provide breakfast service for students in UW, because students only have one choice in the morning, which is Starbucks. We can provide more choices of food than Starbucks. However, our service is not convenient as Starbuck, since students may need to pre-order a night before and we pick up spot may focus on Red Square first.

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There are several major tasks undone. First, we want to know if the customers would like our food. We only did the survey to ask what they would like to eat. It is important to know if they would like the taste of our food. We need feedbacks from them. Besides, we have not set up the prices of our food because the cost of each food is different. We need to set up the price, so that we can determine how to break even. In addition, we found some difficulties to deliver food to the spots. We only have 2 cars, which mean there is limited space to put food inside. If there is a huge amount of orders, we may need to drive more than once to get food to campus. Also, the food is heavy. We may need some extra help to move food from cars to the spots. Moreover, we need to do advertising to let more people know about our company.

7. SWOT analysis

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8. Next Steps Page

Next steps to remediate or cope:- Provided some free food for students to try in Red Square and ask them to give

some feedbacks- List the price of our products

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- Set up a table at Red Square, stop our car nearby the spots as near as possible, and then handling the food to the table

- Give flyers to students and make a video

In order to get feedbacks from customers, we will provide some food samples in Red Square. Students can try them for free and give us comments. According to their feedbacks, we will edit our menu. As long as we finish the menu, we will negotiate with the suppliers and get the lowest costs. After that, we can set up the prices of each food and determine how much we need to sell to break even. To solve the issue of delivering food to the spot, we try to find suppliers who are close to the campus. Although we may need to drive more than once to get the food, it will not take too much time in doing that. Simultaneously, we need to figure out the route which is more convenient for us to deliver food to the spot. For advertising, we believe that providing free food samples in Red Square is one of the ways to advertise our company. Besides, we will make some flyers and give them to students. We will also make a video as an advertisement.

1. Research on customersa) Create an online survey and give it to Chinese students through social mediab) Find out what are the problems of not eating breakfast and give solutions

2. Find potential partners and negotiatea) Find restaurants, which are close to campus and ask if they would be interested

in cooperating with our companyb) Taste their food and negotiate with partners to get the lowest costs of productsc) Set up our selling price and determine how to break even

3. Pre-salea) Provide free food samples in Red Square and ask for feedbacksb) Make poster, flyers and video as advertisementsc) Rewrite our menu, according to the feedbacks

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4. Do the actual sella) Increase number of spots, if neededb) Add more food on menu, if neededc) Manage cash flow and do weekdays delivery

9. Team Introduction

CEOJinyang Luo(Regina): Regina is a senior at the University of Washington majoring in Economics Major in Geography information system and minor in entrepreneurship. She is currently the co-founder of LUKO Seattle; a fashion start-up focuses their design in green classic outfit including jewelry design. As a passionate entrepreneurial person, she starts her business during the middle school by running a coffee shop and resells other small electrical goods. She and her team Vamp won the fourth place in the EIC competition during her freshmen year. With the entrepreneurial mind, she never stops looking for changes and deal with the challenges of a start-up. As founder of the idea of morning china, she will be mainly responsible in leading the whole team in resolving various issues and challenges in the virtual processing problem, particularly in managing the team and distribution of each member's responsibilities.

CTOYedi Luo:Yedi Luo is a senior at the University of Washington majoring in Electrical Engineering Major in Embedded Computing System and minor in entrepreneurship. He is focusing on the technology need of the company, including web/app design, customer registration and advertising. He demonstrated his technology skill in game design and robotic hand construction in his academic field. He also showed his leadership skill as a

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co-founder of an auto lamp manufacture company in China. He is a member of UW EE departmental Honors Program, a member of Tau Beta Pi Honor society, and a member of Gold Key International Honor society.

COOHo Ying Lo (Jane):Jane is a senior who is majoring in Economics. She will be responsible in the marketing field of the company. She will promote the company at all levels to the target customers. In addition, she will analysis the market’s preference to see how our delivery service can provide a well-match breakfast delivery service to meet the customers’ needs. She demonstrated the analytical skills when she was doing an Accounting Internship in Hong Kong last summer to assist her supervisor to analyze company’s (financial) documents; and when she was a Public Relations Officer in the Honor Society: Phi Theta Kappa at Shoreline Community College that she advertised and promoted the chapters to potential students at school.

CFOHung Mei Tsoi (Chloe):Chloe is a senior at University of Washington majoring in Economics, who is a international student from Hong Kong. She will be responsible for the inventory and orders of the company. The position is required with good communication with suppliers and customers. Chloe demonstrated the communication skills when she was a Secretary of Hong Kong Association and tutor in Economics and Math in Shoreline Community College. She held different events with her team members and communicate with her students in order to help them to understand their homework.

CMOCho Yan Tong (Candy):Candy is an international student from Hong Kong, also a senior who is majoring in Economics. She will be responsible in supply chain. In order to practise a cost-effective method, this position requires the ability of strategic planning and practical processes. She demonstrated the communication skills and the skills of strategic planning, while

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she was a financial officer in the Honor Society: Phi Theta Kappa at Shoreline Community College.

Appendix

Exhibit 1: Summary of survey responses

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Exhibit 2: Financial Forecast Report

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