Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship serves as the ultimate way to bring our project, CyanoScent, to the market. To achieve this goal, we finished three rounds of the design/production cycle of the bioreactor and made attempts to make small side-products of our projects to test the market.
Main Product ///
Market needs analysis
Bioreactors are used for research, development, and production purposes in industries such as pharmaceuticals to create vaccines, fermentation in the food and beverage industry, biofuel production, agriculture, and waste management. The worldwide bioreactors market demonstrated a size of USD 9.3 billion in 2022, with projections indicating an anticipated expansion to approximately USD 30.42 billion by 2032. Image Source
Cyano Bioreactor
A cyanobacterial bioreactor is a specialized designed that utilizes carbon dioxide, water, algae for the purpose of generating biomass and oxygen. It plays a pivotal role in mitigating air, water, and solid waste pollution. Furthermore, cyanobacteria have the capacity to synthesize a wide array of secondary metabolites, some of which can be the precursor of many fragrance terpenes. [1]
Our goal is using cyanobacteria to produce fragrances in an environmentally friendly way to reduce people's stress. To make the bioreactor usable in daily life, our team designed two versions of the bioreactor that have a close resemblance to common large and small items in everyday life. For more information, see our Hardware page.
Side Product: Molecular Structure Necklace ///
Beta-pinene and Alpha pinene necklace are related products that we make for our projects. Alpha-pinene and Beta-pinene are compounds found in plants that can produce fragrances and function as anxiety-reliever.
By selling our related product, we encourage an idea of having the public realise that the design based on fragrance molecules can be the fashion and can be cool, which intrigues more people to dig the hidden meaning and the functions of the molecules. Then they can then be informed by our prepare pamphlet on the purpose of our CyanoScent project. Meanwhile, selling necklace can also gain funds to support our activities.
Necklace Design
From the designers: "As an enthusiast of ornaments, when we first saw the aroma molecule structure, we noticed the shape was very suitable for necklaces or earrings. The structure of alpha-pinene and beta-pinene is similar and differentiated, which is very suitable for package selling, so we added a product called couple necklace. However, the sharp end of the system might cause scratches on the skin, so we designed it to have a longer chain so it would go outside of the cloth and not touch the skin directly. One of our difficulties is that boys and girls have height differences. The stable necklace length and size are only fit for someone. Our solution is to design small and big sizes for individual favors.""
Potential Customers
We are intended to reach out to our potential customers, people who like and appreciate our idea of using cyanobacteria to produce fragrance, people who are interested in our product to solve the environmental challenge brought by traditional fragrance production, and people who care about the environment are interested in the fashion design of our side products.
Sale
After we finished the design, we started to presell our project to see how many people are interested in our project. The cost of the necklace is 25 RMB each, and we sale it for 45RMB each. To sell our product, we established several strategies. First, we decided to use WeChat to promote our product. We posted our promotion poster on WeChat, and we added people who are interested to a WeChat group to make it more convenient. Second, we made an advertisement poster to post on social media in order to catch people's attention. During presale, we sold out of 10 of these necklaces and thus gained a 200 RMB profit.
Since we noticed that there are people interested in our necklace, we sponsored the selling again, which is normal selling. This time, we set the price for 54 RMB, and we made a promotional video to further promote our project. Due to this interestingly filmed promo, our product has noticed and interested a lot of people.
