29A: Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity. As you know, the University of Florida has one of the most involved student body’s on campus. Because of this, students follow a strict routine and participate in extracurricular activities and on-campus events, meetings, and seminars. Other students utilize campus to meet with friends or study at the library. But while having this set routine, this can change due to the issue of parking. And we all know that parking is not the greatest thing on campus. Especially around the times of 5:00pm-7:00pm, where many events or organization meetings happen simultaneously in the central part of campus, near the library buildings of Marston and Library West. Around those areas, there are 5 big parking areas students will use in the afternoon time to come to campus and continue their activities. But because there is a rush of students coming to campus in that time frame, plus rush-hour for faculty leaving campus, there is a buildup of traffic in those parking areas, causing students to spend an extra 15-20 minutes searching for parking.

Overall, we can conclude the following from this opportunity:

• The forces creating this opportunity are the growing student population versus the supply of parking
• This market is for college students who drive/park on campus
• Customers are not satisfying this issue
• The opportunity is big
• I’m not entirely sure how long this window of opportunity will be open, but I can assume that the complaints of parking on campus increases every year

Innovation. My product will be an app that will allow students to track parking availability in real-time on campus. Essentially, students would open up the app, enter their desired location, and the app will search for open parking spots around the location you are trying to get to, making the app user-friendly. Once getting to the desired parking area, students will have to log their car into the app, showing that there is one less parking spot in the area for other users to see. Typically, this app would be paid for through the University, where they pay for their students to use the app as a free service. I would ask $10,000 for a 5-year contract, which then could be extended if wanted.

Venture Concept. As this app will be the first of its kind, I think the demand will be high because people will want to ease the stress of finding parking. The business would start as a startup, with a handful of employees that will focus on marketing, programming, financing, and designing the app. The packaging (an app) would make the app user-friendly and be carried in your pocket, so it can be used anywhere. The business location would be started out in Universities, and then spread out to cities and other areas where parking would be difficult to find.

The Three Minor Elements. The secret sauce would be my adaptability to change. Similarly to what I said in assignment 23A, my venture’s unfair advantage would be my skill to being flexible and open to change. This opportunity would allow me to think outside the box in many aspects of my venture. After the creation of this venture, I would want to merge the app with the Passport app since their design ideas are similar, but their opportunities are vastly different.

I didn't receive any feedback, so I just read the Venture Concepts of other students and compared it to mine. Something I really needed to expand on was my Venture Concept section. I didn't give too many details regarding customers and how they would be supported through this venture. I also gave a specific pricing for my app. After hearing feedback from assignment 25A-What's Next?, I decided that my next venture would be to merge apps that relate to parking into one major app, where there would be multiple tabs that relate to paying for parking, finding parking, etc.