The University of Nebraska at Omaha is continuing to offer students hands-on opportunities to create real startups to grow the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Omaha. This semester the Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Franchising (CIEF) is offering a new course called Entrepreneurial Selling. Levi Cermak, CIEF Associate Director, stated, “Entrepreneurial Selling is a unique opportunity for students as they are gaining real-world experience besides the knowledge they gain in the classroom.” The course walks students through the first steps of designing and selling a product or service.
The class has graciously received a donation of an existing wellness software called Layered Health from OpsCompass. Manny Quevedo, John Grange, and John Frerichs first developed Layered Health to track steps through Fitbits. This allowed for the creation of weekly recommendations for employees, quarterly assessments for companies, and competition through gamification. They were able to sell their corporate wellness technology to companies across Omaha, along with pursuing another target market of Orthopedic programs in which tracking of steps is vital for patients and physicians.
Students were given the opportunity to pick John Grange and John Frerichs brains to learn more about Layered Health. This was a great opportunity for students to learn what worked and, more importantly, what didn’t when selling Layered Health to customers. After coming to the conclusion that corporate wellness was not the best path forward, the students were able to reach their new target market of senior care facilities. With this new path forward Levi Cermak stated, he believes “this is a very appropriate target market within a very strong and expanding industry with many opportunities to expand services, more so than within corporate wellness.”
As a class, students are looking to continue to build off the technology that OpsCompass has created to track steps, heart rate, and activity amongst residents in senior care facilities. The students believe this information can be leveraged to provide a better experience for patients, their families, physicians, and the facilities.
Right now, students are in the beginning stages of developing traction channels to promote and sell Layered Health. Students have developed strategic marketing channels to reach their target market. In order to keep track of potential customers, students are utilizing Hubspot, a popular customer relationship management tool. This allows students to continue to follow up on leads and add new ones collectively as a class. Students are learning how to make new connections, follow up on leads, conduct sales interviews and how to close a sale.
Students are using customer discovery techniques that they have learned in class to build the new Layered Health. In doing this, students are customer-focused in order to create the best product that solves the needs within the senior care industry. With that being said, they would like the help from the Mug News community connections at senior care facilities to do just that. Specifically, they are looking for directors or management staff that would be willing to meet with the students to help them determine how they can develop Layered Health to best fit the needs of the industry.
If you know of anyone who may be able to help, please feel free to reach the students at [email protected].
Continue to follow these students and Layered Health’s journey on social media through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
