29A- Venture Concept No.2

For this opportunity, there is a market in Gainesville of customers that have an unmet need of trying to do better in their classes and have tried various ways around UF and just need another way to try and do better. This opportunity presents a nature of need that many students have tried getting help in their classes and are just at a dead end and don't have the social ways to try and get help but with Study Buddy, this would help with that by giving students access to other students in the classes that they are in and being able to post or reach out to other students to see if they could help in the class. This would also provide a way for people to find tutors and reach out to individuals to try and get help in their classes. My market right now is defined to university population of Gainesville and consists of students ranging from ages 18-25 both male and female. Customers are currently satisfying this need by reaching out to their professors but my thought is that if you aren't getting the material in lecture then going to your professor wont't help much more. Then students are also using local tutoring places but they are kinda pricy and only do some of the entry level classes and not much of the higher level classes where some students can struggle. I feel like this idea can grow into something big and the window of time I feel like is somewhat open for a while as most of the tutoring places in Gainesville have been open for a while and you can enter that market if you have the means. As far as innovation, this is not "ground breaking" by any means and more or less just adds on to current methods of getting help in the class room but in a way that most people my age would feel comfortable with. And this being a social media app that I would develop and put out. Here students can post of class walls looking for help in certain subject areas, they can look for tutors in other areas and also try and reach out to other students in their classes for help and see if they can learn the material in a new helpful way. I would not charge people to pay for the app because I don't think many people would pay for it up front but I would have ads on the app and make money from that and then later down the road see if I could charge a monthly fee or some sort of access fee if demand is high enough. Then onto the venture part of this assignment. I think it would be kind of hard to get people to switch just because they are so used to the learning methods they have now, but I think once they try it out and see that it could help them, then I think it would make for an easy switch. My competitors are the local tutoring businesses around Gainesville and I think the major weakness of them is how expensive it is. For some students this isn't a problem but over times these costs can add up and students don't like this. Plus they only offer entry level classes and once you get to your major level classes you must do everything on your own and I think my app would be a way for these students to connect and have a way to try and do better in their classes. As far as developing the business, I think I could run the business side of things and marketing and things like that, my biggest hurtle would be to just develop the app and for this I would try and assemble a team that would make this very easy to do. We work on the app and develop it to meet all the business needs and then put it out for customer use. My most important resource would be the social capital that I have around me as there are many start ups in Gainesville and I can learn a lot from these people on how to run a start up and run it successfully. After we are successful in Gainesville, I would want to try and branch out to other campuses around the U.S. because I think if we can work at UF, we can work anywhere. In five years, I want to have moved to a couple different campuses and ready to sell because I feel like another company or someone can scale this business better and hopefully make some money off of it. As far as what I changed, I just put more focus on how I wanted to end and also put more emphasis on the venture part of this concept. I needed to focus more on my competitors and how I was gonna make money and all those things and I think I did a better job in this one with these.

(So easy, a dog could use it)