7A – Testing the Hypothesis, Part 1

1. An opportunity I would like to pursue is facilitating transactions among elderly who have things to sell but do not own the technology literacy to do so.

2.
a. Who: Technology illiterate elderlies who desire to sell their possessions.
b. What: They are unable to market their goods due to inability to work with technology to reach potential buyers.
c. Why: Some elderly people have not learned how to use technology and are not up to date on how to operate one for the purpose of selling.

3.
a. Testing Who: Although my opportunity emphasizes technological illiteracy among older people, this opportunity can expand to anyone at any age who wish to sell online, but, are limited by this constraint.
b. Testing What: My opportunity is limited by the fact that you can learn how to operate and use technologies to sell through online resources such as videos. However, there is still a market for people who want an in-person session, just like how students demand to learn with a live tutor.
c. Testing Why: Some may have this need due to the lack of people willing to spend the time to teach this skill. Others may have this need to due to initially finding no reason to learn and become well versed in technology. I do not think there is a universal reason for why someone would be technologically illiterate as this is a decision someone makes if they want to develop this certain skill.

4. I’ve interviewed with five different people to get a better understand of how my opportunity stands currently. I interviewed two grandfathers, one grandmother is also the wife of one of the mentioned grandfathers, a grandson who visits his grandparents occasionally, and a granddaughter who lives with her grandmother. As mentioned in my hypothesis above, one of my interviewees finds little reason to delve into learning about technology in his/her current lifestyle. Thus, because of low motivation, he/she only learns the basics of using them, such as making calls or searching up recipes. There is also a high variance of technical difficulties that one can run into when using technology. Because such a high variety of technology exists, encountering a technological difficulty can be much easier to solve if there were a live person to teach. One of the grandparents was once a doll collector but now needs to remove some of them due to the amount of space it is taking in their house. However, they cannot find someone who would buy them yet. They have yet to try to use the internet to reach a larger audience. Again, this ties back to my opportunity of facilitating transactions among people who lack these skills. One of the most important things I’ve learned from this interview that I forgot to account for is the language barrier. Some of the grandparents that I interviewed or was mentioned in my interviews are immigrants from a foreign language speaking country. Due to the English being a common language to communicate in the United States, it can dissuade people from making personal transactions with English speakers. Likewise, it also dissuades these people from also learning how to use English e-commerce websites. This also brings into a potential expansion of my opportunity by having bilingual tutors teach technology to foreign speakers. I do recognize that there are language options within computers and phones, however, it still is not enough for someone to effectively learn how to use it by themselves.