Entrepreneurship is a multifaceted practice that employs a wide variety of skills, techniques, and specializations to bring all sorts of innovative and new ideas to fruition. Dillon Jayanthan is a senior at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in business. Dillon realized the truth to this definition of entrepreneurship as he developed as an aspiring entrepreneur himself in his Fall 2021 semester taking FSE 301. Here, he created and developed his venture called Efficient Flyer, where users could gain live data and accurate predictions on airport and flight wait times, statuses, and more.
During Dillon’s early development stage of interviews, he realized that his initial idea could be expanded in terms of functionality. After a few initial interviews, Dillon realized that no matter what type of flyer the user was, there was a way it could be applicable to their specific use case, either as it stood out or with little modification or added functionality. This led Dillon’s product to employ a multifaceted business model, which made it stand out from many other ventures in the sense that it had numerous models it could make money from, giving it a host of benefits such as a more reliable stream of income and a higher potential for maximum profits. The goal of Dillon’s venture was to enable users to be able to get live and accurate information on the status of various parts of an airport, such as drive-thrus, security lines, boarding lines, and various other information specific airports would provide.
Chico Jay, a 55-year-old frequent flyer, who flies numerous times sporadically a year for business trips, was one of the main target customers for this product. Chico fulfilled the sector of users that are constantly traveling to places and airports they’ve never been to before, and thus would not know the general trends or updates on issues going on with the airport. Daya Kan, a 52-year-old frequent flyer, typically flies the same trip every time to visit her parents and siblings overseas in Australia. She said that despite knowing both departure and arrival airports very well, every time is a little different to a point where she cannot predict them accurately using her past experience. Nathan Jay, a 20-year-old college student, said he rarely travels, so he has no idea what to expect at an airport when he does. These three different types of users encompassed the large majority of use cases for the users of Dillon’s product. He utilized this information to create a multifaceted business model which he says is one of the key parts to his product being an even bigger success than it might seem on initial understanding.
“Being a software engineer, we learn how to build amazing powerful products from the ground up by ourselves, but we have no curriculum that shows us how to apply that and bring it to fruition in the real world,” said Dillon, “Taking this course gave me the framework and understanding of how to go about that. The value this class holds is underrated by far, a lot of people could benefit from this, especially engineers who don’t have classes like this in their curriculum.”
Connect with Dillon (above) on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillon-jayanthan/