Venture Concept #1

Opportunity

            My product is an app that will help people choose where to go eat. It will focus on restaurants around the University of Florida campus with an emphasis on local or family owned restaurants. The app will break down all the restaurants by type of food, as well as, deal of the day – a function that will show all meals for under seven dollars on that given day.

            The need for a product like this is had by college students (the eighteen to twenty-five-year-old range), which is why I would focus primarily on restaurants within a fifteen-mile radius of the University of Florida campus. The need is not critical, however, the college-aged demographic is often missed by other comparable food applications. Many apps focus on an older demographic or to families. The University of Florida has over 50,000 students, many of whom are living on a budget or do not have the desire to eat at upscale restaurants as often as people who have “made it” in this world. I think this is what is the environment that has created this opportunity. The opportunity would be limited at first to major universities because these are the areas where the most people fitting the demographic would be located. College campuses also tend to be host to some of the best, local restaurants, from my personal experience. Customers currently use word of mouth, the internet, or another food app, such as Yelp!, to meet their needs. I do not think they are extremely loyal because none of these solutions are great at finding all of the best cheap and local restaurants. This opportunity could be huge if one or two college campuses took, but gaining that kind of foothold could be tough with populations that move so frequently.

Innovation

            Like I mentioned in my first paragraph, my innovation is an app that will help, mainly college students, choose where to go eat on an evening out. It will have two main features: type of food and deal of the day. The type of food option is nothing innovative, it will simply break down the restaurants in Gainesville by what cuisine is served. For example, it would break it down by Mexican, Italian, American, Sandwiches, etc. This would be useful because many people tend to go to one restaurant for each type of food they eat. Meaning they will go to Chipotle for Mexican food, Leo’s for pizza/Italian, Subway for sandwiches, and so on. This leaves people roughly five to seven places they eat at and they never expand their horizons because they do not know of other alternatives. By listing each restaurant by type, people could go beyond the one or two places they know under each food type and expand their horizons. The deal of the day function is what will make my app stand out from competition. This will focus on meals specials/ deals that are under seven dollars. Many restaurants have promotional activities for given days of the week. For example, you have the classic taco Tuesday and slice of the day, but there is also $3 Burger Monday’s and Wednesday’s, Throwback Thursday’s, Wing night, BBQ night, Irish Sunday, and a plethora of other local deals in Gainesville. Many students who do not expand their horizons miss out on all of these possible deals at various locations and find when they leave after graduation, they only know where the chains are.

            This won’t be a huge money making idea. I plan to make enough money to keep it running by selling ad space on the app, as well as, promoting special events for venues. This will both gain usage of my app because people will be able to see what is going on this week/month but it will also boost attendance to these venues. If they agree to give 10% of the profits for that night to me, I would need to have the highest attendance possible. With an increase in downloads I would also gain more profits from ad space as I would have more traffic on the app.

Venture Concept

          My app will solve the need for the demographic I am aiming at because they will now have an app that directly relates to their lives, instead of a partial solution that occasionally meets their needs. Since I am offering an app, and the app store and Google play are difficult markets in themselves, it will be free to customers. This is why I would need to sell ad space on the app. Due to the fact that it will be free, I believe, more people would be willing to download it and tell their friends to do the same. This will be necessary because it will be hard to gain awareness, as a result, I will need word of mouth to help gain popularity. Once people have heard about my app it will be easier to gain adherence, however, separating myself from all the other apps may be difficult in the beginning. My main competition would be Yelp!, simply because of its name recognition. By focusing on only one market, I think I would be able to take some market share from them around UF.

            I think once I have gained traction with restaurants I could easily transfer over and do the same thing with bars and clubs. This is another area that would be specific to college students that is currently be under represented.

            After launching my app, I would hope to move to a few other college campuses and gain popularity around the state of Florida. I do not want to hold on too long because I would not have the capabilities to monitor all these locations for changing deals. As a result, I would try to exit in roughly five years after gaining popularity around UF.