Business plan for a new venture idea

Abstract

The idea initially started at looking into the ways to avoid the gamut of messages on sales, offers and special discounts that flood the customers’ inboxes who visit the several retail stores and restaurants. We planned to redirect these messages through a mobile application which can locate the customer and pass the relevant (places which are near to the customer’s location) messages through push notifications. This on one hand is providing the customer the ability to avoid the unnecessary information that clutters their mobile devices and on the other hand helps the retailers and restaurants to attain leads which have a greater probability to convert. As we took forward the idea and interacted with a few customers we realized that these kind of apps should be more usable to the customers, that is the number of use cases or situations in which the app can be utilized must be increased so as to make the customers stick to the app. This is to make the app with rich relevant information based on the user’s preferences and should not be interrupting the customer flooding with irrelevant notifications. Above all this the app should be lighter and less power consuming to ensure that the app wouldn’t reduce the efficiency of the device the customer utilizes. Methodology: With the idea in mind we started looking at various apps which provide similar solutions to the customers. Some of the apps are Frapp, coupon dunia, Near buy by groupon, Dealocx, foursquare and Bounty. Though the list is not exhaustive we tried to understand how their business models are and how they view the business space as. In this process we met one of start-up Bounty team, whose app also works in the same space. The technology used by bounty works even offline or not on data networks which makes it unique among the apps we studied. The interview majorly gave us insights of how the technology is developed, tested and deployed by them. We took cues from them and progressed on finding out various technologies that are used in location based apps with their pros and cons. The costs involved in building these apps is an important factor in a start-up point of view, we briefly tried to understand the costs involved in building the mobile apps. We finally gave some of the possible business models which can be implement and tested so as to further the idea.