Assignment 29: Venture Concept No.2

Opportunity:

               My app focuses on those who are like myself. These are people who have a love for sports but do not have the sufficient network of people who have the same interest in the sports as they do or just have different schedules. Right now, the main way that people communicate with each other in sports events is through intramural sports or just by calling their friends and seeing if they want to meet up.

               In my experience and through research inside the minds of my target market, I have found these solutions to be mostly ineffective. The people are okay with the solution that they are currently using but they would like to see some innovation and change. The current solutions that they use do not allow them to coordinate as effectively as my app will allow them to. They do not usually allow for flexibility in schedules for most people and I have also found that people do not have sufficient numbers for most sports. They also are not able to try new sports because they cannot find enough people to be interested in trying these new sports. I believe that the app that I plan to develop will fix these main problems that my target market is experiencing.

               The market that I am targeting are University of Florida students and Santa Fe College students in the Gainesville area. These people are the most feasible to target at this point because there are a lot of them and they also like to play sports so this will be a good market to target. They do not have the most money but my intention is not to make money off of the target market themselves. My intention is to make money of the ads that will be posted on the app because of the traction I hope to accumulate through this app.

               I think the opportunity for this app is relatively small to start off but it could become bigger if there is enough traction at the start. If there are a lot of people using it and a lot of satisfied users, then this could spread to other places outside the Gainesville area. Since this is an app that will be on both the Apple Store and Google Play Store, this app can be easily disseminated throughout the state and throughout the country with relatively low cost. The window of opportunity would probably be a short window because there are already people trying to develop these apps but they are not gaining enough traction through ineffective marketing techniques. If I can find a way to generate enough traction to get people to talk about and download this app, I believe it will be very successful.

Innovation:

               The way that my app would work is basically like the current social media platforms that exist at the moment. A person would create a post that shows what sport they want to play, what date and time, how many people they have on board, how many more people they need, and a way to direct message people so that they can effectively coordinate the sports that they want to play.

               It is not a radically innovative product because it is basically the same format as the several main social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. However, it is something that people have never heard of before and for this reason I believe it is incrementally innovative because of the fact that it is building off of previously created social media platforms.

               The way that this app will make money is not to the people that I will be marketing to in the end. The customer is the person that I plan on making money off of primarily. To start, I will plan on making a number of posts per month for free and if they want to make any additional posts, it will cost them $1.99 per month for unlimited posts. My initial idea would be to have 5 free posts per month and then the additional fee for any more posts that you want to make. Eventually, I would hope to make the most of my money off of the advertisements that companies would put on my app so that I can generate revenue from the customers and the companies. These would happen after the app gains traction and would give another boost in income from the app later on in the product’s life time.

Venture Concept:

               I think that customers will have an easy time switching to this product because it not only allows them to coordinate sports more efficiently and effectively but it does not require learning from the customer because of the easily recognizable format that it uses. Plus, it’s free to download! The problem is that competitors because since it is like the other social media platforms, they could just make their own type of product on their existing sites with the large amount of people that already use it. There are no real packaging or distribution costs with this product because it is a smartphone app so it is on the internet and not a physical product.

               The number of employees that I would need depends on how large the product becomes. I would start out with a software engineer, a software maintenance person and myself. As the company grows, I would probably hire more software people and maybe some marketing personnel to help the business grow.

Three minor elements:

               I think the unfair advantage that I have is my competitive nature and my irritation with procrastination. These will help me complete objectives and take initiatives with my product.

               The next thing for my venture is development and dissemination. These are critical for the product’s success.

               The final thing that I want to accomplish after the launch and five years from now is to have a successful app that have many users and good reviews so that I can feel accomplished.

Feedback:
               The feedback that I received on this assignment and the What's Next assignment was either positive or non-critical of my concept but I believe that I have a pretty good idea of what will happen to this product. I think I have a realistic perception of my product and the future of my product and have it pretty well laid out in this and the What's Next assignment. I think one thing I could do is instead of finding a market based on a different group of people instead of an area. This could be focusing on non-college students or students from a different college.