24A - Venture Concept No. 1

Opportunity:

This opportunity is one that has a lot of potential is an opportunity for a group of customers and people who have an unmet or under-met need. As a freshman at the University of Florida, I was part of this unmet need as I was from south Florida living in Gainesville, Florida with no car and no real transportation. Finding rides back home were always a pain and something that was such a hassle to deal with at the time. If I couldn't find a ride my options were to take a bus that essentially doubled the travel time or instead pay for a plane ticket that usually more than $500 one way. This seemed like a conflict that needed to be solved and I felt that I was the right person to make sure that this unmet need went met in the coming future. The need of this service is college students all around the state of Florida and the nature of this need was critical as students are constantly traveling back and forth from school to home etc. The forces that helped create this opportunity is the never ending conflict that not every kid at school has a car that they can use to travel from home to school. Geographically most kids from the state of Florida end up going to college in the state Florida that may be as close as minutes away to almost eight hours away, overall this idea has potential based on the fact that the attendance of these schools is through the roof and not decreasing anytime soon. Customers are currently satisfying this need by taking busses and planes which is not convenient nor price friendly to the consumers. This window of opportunity will be open ultimately forever as parents do not allow students to take their cars up to school with them.

Innovation:

My innovative thinking and idea is to establish an application that can be utilized on any mobile device that is used as a communication forum for students at each local university that allows you to communicate and offer students to drive other students back to their home whether that mean dropping them off at a certain location or bringing them straight to their door, ultimately these needs need to be met because consumers are suffering all the time when they are in need of a ride and have nowhere to go for it. My application allows you to do background checks and find out basic information with the person you are driving with as well as allows you to chat and for you to get to know one another. A feature on my application is offering incentives for both the driver and rider based on how many miles you have traveled together which include different restaurant promotions and coupons as well as saving money on gas and car washes as we all know cars get very dirty when traveling long distances. I will make money from this opportunity by students all around the state of Florida by downloading this application that will serve as a convenient service for students that do not want to spend money on airplane or bus rides. I was planning on starting this application for free so that it gains traction and popularity amongst the local schools and then she where I can make extra money buy ultimately I believe the popularity and potential is there for this service.

Venture Concept:

My innovation will directly solve this opportunity and unmet need because it serves as a benchmark and a sense of simplicity as this travel application allows students to communicate with other students to coordinate rides home amongst each other. This service solves many financially discrepancies that many students still encounter with today so I believe that this idea will help solve that and I truly believe that there are many features and incentives that this will be a hit on college campuses in the state of Florida and hopefully across the United States. This concept started as an idea as I was a freshman at UF with no car and nobody to ride with, this idea helps a financial burden as it is too expensive and not simple for kids to get rides home from school anymore. Students will adapt to this service and use it as their number one go to when they are in need of a ride whether that be for a break such as winter or spring or just they need to go home for an emergency and they luckily caught a student going home at the same time as them. Overall, this has potential and room to grow, this service will be of usage in the future to many students.

My most important resource within this service as to serving the consumer is that as of now no other company has come up with such a service and the only existing similar idea is social media pages that are highly unreliable and have many problems attached to them. I believe that these incentives an features based on milage for food and other cool things give me the upper hand in this process and makes my brand and service stick out.

The next thing that is up for my venture is to reach out and really test this application on local gainesville students who are in need of rides for summer break. Clearly kids do need this service as the struggle occurs every semester with kids who need to have their parents drive up here to help them go back home or to buy plane tickets. It is a financial burden and I believe this idea will be successful and just need the right guidance ahead.

The thing that is up for me, assuming I launched this application, is to watch it grow and expand. Hopefully that in the state of Florida it will be very successful in the coming half decade and thats where I will probably attempt to move it and expand past the state of Florida and see if I can test this out in other states. I believe that the unmet need that exists in Floria fully exists in other states so I think that expanding across the United States is where I want to go with this idea.