Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity

My group of customers with unmet or under-met needs is UF students who are pursuing a business or accounting major, or a business minor. Over time, depending how successful my business idea is, I’d like to expand my opportunity to include other UF students pursuing different majors in the other colleges. The market is somewhat undefined geographically, and typically defined demographically by students aged 18-22. While most users would be located in Gainesville during the fall and spring semesters, there are students that go abroad or take classes online over the summer from other locations.

My market’s needs are both unmet and under-met, depending on how much coursework a student has completed. Students enrolled in prerequisite courses, such as Principles of Marketing, Principles of Management, and Intro to Financial Accounting have their needs under-met, while students taking major courses, such as Equity and Capital Markets or Consumer Behavior have unmet needs. Study Edge and Smokin’ Notes are good for learning the material, but Study Edge focuses more on the mathematical portions of the classes they offer. The conceptual portion of the curriculum that is still tested on isn’t touched on very much during the review sessions, leaving opportunity to better meet this need. Moreover, Smokin’ Notes are useful for understanding the material since they present it in laymen’s terms. However, they’re very lengthy and therefore not as useful for memorizing key terms and concepts because of the time it takes to find a particular term or topic amongst their 90+ pages. Although students are loyal to these programs, not all of their classes are offered by them, leaving a huge opportunity to fulfill a completely unmet need.

Innovation

I am providing a service in the form of an application where students can play various study games, single-player or with their classmates, with content specific to their professors’ curriculums. These games include trivia (similar to the format of QuizUp), Jeopardy, mix & match games (rearranging things to put them in the right place; good for accounting, equations/ratios, graphs/charts, and pneumonics), and crossword puzzles. Students can play against their friends by sending each other special links to their games, or they can be matched up randomly with another student using the app.

The app will be free to download, but access to the app’s content will be available for a $9.99 annual fee. This fee will include 25 free tokens. Moreover the app will feature in-app purchases, namely tokens. Single-player games and random match-ups will cost 5 tokens each, but not games against friends. When students play these games, they’ll earn tokens for the questions they get right, which can then be used to purchase single-player or random match-up rounds. Because students would most likely want to avoid using up tokens, they might invite their friends to play first, who would have to pay the $9.99 fee. Moreover, when tokens are used up students will be willing to pay for more because they’ll be inexpensive, and students may really need the extra review.

Venture Concept

My innovation will address the opportunity identified by providing students with quick, fun study games to promote memorization of key terms and concepts, equations, charts and graphs, etc. This service alone isn’t provided to students through Study Edge or Smokin’ Notes. Moreover, my service will provide material for all UF business courses, rather than just the ones with large enrollments. Customers will purchase this because it’s affordable, compared to the $200+ other resources cost per semester. This is especially important for students that are paying their way through school or have to worry about various other expenses, like rent, and can’t afford Study Edge or Tutoring Zone memberships. Moreover, it’s a great and entertaining way to review and help process information after learning a hefty amount of material, and it promotes memorization.

My competitors are technically the popular study resources, like Study Edge, Tutoring Zone, and Smokin’ Notes. Their biggest vulnerability is that they only offer review material for the very large classes. However, my intention isn’t necessarily for students to cancel their Study Edge/TZ memberships and to stop buying Smokin’ Notes; my service is supposed to be a supplement to these resources. The reason being, that these services teach students the material, and my service helps them apply what they were taught so it sinks in better.

My venture would require a team with the IT skills to create an app and be able to update and make changes regularly. Moreover, I’d need around 15 employees (subject to change) to and take notes on professors’ lecture slides and the class textbook(s), and be able to update them regularly; keeping in mind each employee could be responsible for more than one class.

Three Minor Elements

1.    I have a large market with a potentially high level of demand, very competitive pricing, and the networking capabilities to spread the word.

2.    The next step for my venture would be to expand to the courses of the other majors and colleges, and perhaps even move on to graduate-level courses.

3.    In all honesty, in the future I could see this as maybe being a side-gig since I’m in school to study finance, and information systems and operations management. Being an entrepreneur doesn’t really coincide with my vision, which is having a desk job and job security (riveting, I know).

Summary of Feedback

I received a lot of positive feedback on my first Venture Concept post. People really seemed to like how it's available in app form which makes it very accessible and doesn't require the motivation to grab all your study gear and forage for a spot at the library, especially now. The feedback I received also indicated that they really liked how my service is tailor-made for my customers' courses they're currently enrolled in. I did not receive any negative feedback.

Because I received 100% positive feedback, I don't think there are areas of my venture concept that need changing. If anything, I could include that I would be open to partnering with one of the big tutoring resources, such as Smokin' Notes, when I go on to sell my business.