Venture Concept 1

My business venture is at its core a company that works with colleges and the restaurants on their campus to develop an app to provide pre-ordering services to customers.

Opportunity: Currently on UF’s campus there are over a dozen different type of restaurants available for students during the day, and some over-night. The restaurants are popular chains that become very bus y during the day when college life is at its busiest. The restaurants however, do not have a way for students to pre-order the food/coffee they want and pick up when it’s ready. This leaves college students whose schedules are jammed packed during the day without an opportunity to get the food that they want. This decreases the amount of business the restaurant could possibly have, and taking away a future customer because of it.

·         The forces in the environment that are creating this opportunity are the school class periods, and the growing need for college students to be involved in multiple programs in order to give them the edge that they need to get a good job the competitive job market. This leaves them with little time, but doesn’t take away the desire to order food from Chik-fil-a, or coffee from Starbucks.

·         Geographically the market is defined on campus, demographically the market is colleges without to-go app abilities within their campus.

·         Currently students who don’t have time are not buying on –campus. Some customers might be ordering things off-campus from different locations. Since there is no other use because there is no other application like this on campus, the potential customers aren’t loyal to anyone else.

·         This has a large potential to increase customer reach.

·         I think the “window of opportunity” will be open until someone else comes in and does it. With people relying more and more on technology every year it is inevitable for this to be the next step.

Innovation: The To-Go app is an innovated version of the traditional walk in to-goes. Currently if someone wants to order something from the restaurants on campus they have to go in wait in line, wait for their food. It doesn’t sound too complicated, but with the app it saves people n a hurry time, and it opens up the opportunity to get food for the people who don’t have the time to waste. It allows for someone to have their food ready to go and paid for by the time they reach the restaurant. It cuts out the time consumption from waiting. With real time notifications, you can order something and know exactly when you need to be there to get in and get out quickly with your order. The business itself, or the profit portion, is a service provided to the campus to buy, similar to paying for construction. We research for efficiency, build it, and maintenance it based on customer feedback. From there it’s the universities, but if something goes wrong, we’re the ones who come in and fix it.

Venture Concept: The business innovation will address the opportunity by solving the problem of not having enough time. The whole innovation is based off the ability to reduce the amount of time, for the customer, during the process of ordering, buying, and receiving food/coffee. I believe that customer will want this because it is an opportunity for the restaurants on campus to make more money. Since the business is aimed towards colleges themselves, I think that with student interest the college itself will become interested.

·         I think customers will use this because it fits in the picture of college lifestyle along with a step into a more efficient future. Since the college is switching to anything, but rather adopting something new I don’t think it will be very hard to convince them.

·         My competitors are similar apps outside campus’ that might want to extend inside. I think their vulnerabilities are their focus. I don’t think they’re focused on this market.

·         Customer support, I believe, will be the biggest aspect of producing and maintaining this app. It is the biggest seller because it takes away the responsibility from the university, and customer support for apps similar to this is the backbone to any app.

·         The business would involve multiple programmers, and researchers that would develop and design the app in order to best fit the customer. Then would be the face of the company, or the person/people who would sell the idea to colleges and advertise it to others. Then the person in charge who made sure everything was running smoothly.

Minor Elements:

1.      My most important resource would be the fact that so far no one else has tried to get in on this possible opportunity. Basically being at the head of the race.

2.      After developing the app, I would hope to be part of the beginning processes of restaurants coming to campuses. This way we could organize the store itself to optimize the flow of traffic to accommodate both app orders and in-store orders.

3.      In the next five years I plan on being in a developing country helping bring/ teach sustainable practices and needed resources. As for this business in the next five years, I hope the college realizes this opportunity and takes advantage of it.