Venture Concept 2

Introduction

1. My idea for a venture is to create an app that allows customers to track the wait times at their favorite restaurants, from the average fast food joint, to the most extravagant luxury restaurants. This will allow customers to find the restaurant with the right wait time to satisfy their needs.

Opportunity

1.     The ideal customer

a.     The ideal customer can ideally be anyone. Everyday people eat out and wait in lines at restaurants to get their food. The main people with this need is those who work and only have a limited amount of time for a lunch break, as well as students in college who may only have a limited time in between classes to go grab a bite to eat.

b.     The initial focus of my business will be to target university students as I have a large network of friends in college at the University of Florida and have access to so many more.

2.     The need

a.     The two main aspects of this need are convenience and efficiency. With anything, most people get irritated when something isn’t running efficiently or does not meet their expectations of efficiency. I personally have experienced this when waiting at Chipotle. After waiting for twenty minutes, I finally got to the front of the line to order my food only to find out that the restaurant had run out of chicken and it would be another five minutes before they had a new batch out. Already irritated, I settled with steak in order to maximize efficiency and get out of the restaurant faster. When walking past Tijuana Flats, I noticed that they had no line and realized that I could have gotten Mexican food from there instead and not have had to wait for 25 minutes just to get something that I really didn’t want.

b.     Customers are currently satisfying this need by placing online orders and calling restaurants ahead of time to see how long the wait in the restaurant is. Unsurprisingly, people are very loyal to online ordering because of its efficiency.

c.     I personally think that this is a big opportunity that can span to many different cities around the country. This need is present from big cities to small college town around the nation.

Innovation

1.     My innovation

a.     My innovation involves developing an app that tracks the number of people in a restaurant at a time and the customer turnover rate that restaurant has. The customer turnover rate is the amount of time it takes from the customer entering the restaurant to the customer finally receiving their food. The average wait time at the restaurants could then be looked up on the app of the customer so that they can compare wait times and factor the time it will take them to wait for their food into their day.

2.     Incrementally Innovative

a.     This innovation is incrementally innovative. This is because the customers will not have to learn any new skills in order to use this product. It will be exactly like any other smartphone app and no new technology would need to be developed in order to make the business idea work.

b.     The way this innovation will make money is through the use of advertising throughout the app. There will be banner ads that will be paid for by businesses to promote themselves. The app will be free to both restaurants and customers. There may also be a later version that charges a monthly fee for extra features once customer loyalty has been built.

Venture Concept

1.     The innovation of the app meets the opportunity of people’s need for efficiency and their lack of time throughout the day. The customer that I am targeting is not directly generating revenue for this business. However, it’s their use of the app and the traffic that they generate that will be the selling point to companies to advertise on my app.

2.     Customers would switch to this product because it is easier to use and gives you real time updates to how long wait times are at restaurants. It is very convenient and will give customers an opportunity to choose where to eat based on how long they have to wait.

3.     I think the current competitors are online pickup ordering as it is a way to completely avoid a line at all and gives you the ability to set a pickup time. Another competitor are the food delivery services because people can use them so they don’t even have to leave their house to get food.

Other Elements

1.     The secret sauce of this business is the relationship with restaurants and response to customers needs. Businesses that usually have short lines because less people eat there will start to get more attention due to the fact that they may be the fastest option when going to get food. Building this trust with restaurants will continue to their want to be represented on our app and will increase the number of users that we have. The higher the traffic the more attractive it is to advertisers.

2.     I think the next opportunity for this venture is to expand to other places such as grocery stores. I think that the app could also be further developed to have a review page for customers to review restaurants and rate the accuracy of the wait times. It could also later be transformed to allow customers to make reservations similar to Open Table. Expanding my business to allow dinner reservations as well will help appeal to an older crowd who rather nice dinners than fast food lines.

3.     In five years, I want this venture to have expanded to every major college town in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Depending on the success, I would also want it to be in all the major cities in these states as well.

I mostly received positive feedback from my peers. The biggest thing that people have said is to expand my target market to adults as well. The best way to do this is by offering wait times at nicer restaurants as well as allowing reservations through the app to make it more convenient. I have already touched on adding these to my venture in the past to continue to expand. Another thing was expanding to large cities rather than just college towns.

The thing that I changed in my venture concept was specifically stating that I plan on expanding to an adult target market in the future, and what things I would add to my business in order to go after this new target audience.