My Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity: 

We have an opportunity to help with the needs of many college students at the University of Florida. Our customers will be these students and almost all of them have one thing in common; they all need transportation to some extent. From the grocery store to the mall to the gym; we all have places to go. With this need for transportation in mind, we have the solution. The reason that this problem has grown larger is that each class of students coming on to our campus each year is getting larger and thus we see an increase in demand to have places to park there cars. With this increase in demand from the students, we also see a demand among professors and faculty to push for new and better facilities to operate their craft in. The problem with this is that both of those things cannot happen, we cannot produce more buildings for teaching and research and construct more parking lots and garages. Geographically, the problem is focused mainly on-campus and for about five blocks in each direction. Demographically, our target market would consist of mainly college students from the age of 18-23 that do not have a car or that are so fed up with trying to park on campus, that they have just given up. Most of these students will be busy and in need of a fix to their problem whenever it arises, immediately. Currently, most students substitute this need by using their feet to walk to campus or using a scooter. Unfortunately, students cannot all afford scooters and often, it isn't feasible to walk to some parts of campus because you are either in a hurry or it is too far and hot. Most scooter operators are loyal to how they satisfy this need because it is relatively quick and eco-efficient. Potential customers that walk are not satisfied mostly because it takes longer and is more exhausting. This opportunity is pretty big, with nearly 55,000 students attending the University of Florida. This window of opportunity will be open as long as the University of Florida doesn't decide to build more garages across campus. But even if that were to occur, our solution would still be viable for people who do not own a car either.

Innovation:

I will be providing an on-demand, Eco-friendly, pay-as-you-go biking system that has stations located conveniently around campus to help students get where they need to go on time and quickly. My innovation includes having about 15 bicycles located at each of our 16 stations around the campus and surrounding neighborhoods. This will help meet the need because they can come to any station or use our app at Ez2Bike and they can rent a bike at a charge of $1.00 an hour by using their debit/credit card to pay. They will input their card information and then it will unlock the bike for the user and they will have free-roaming usage of this bike until they are finished. When they are finished, they can return the bike at any of our 16 conveniently located stations and they will insert their card again. At this point, the machine will read how long they had used the bike and will charge their card based on the hourly rate. If a renter chooses not to return the bike, we have their credit card information on file and are more than willing to charge the fee for the bike that they have stolen, this way we are not liable to any lost bikes without full reimbursement. If we cannot access their card any longer because they cancelled it, we will have a master list of names and will file a police report. This bike that they will rent will come equipped with securely attached lights for night riding. The app that we will be using will show the user how many bikes are available at each station and allow them to rent a bike in advance if they believe there will be a high demand at any given time.



Venture Concept:

When a student needs to go to a class or exam and they are late, they cannot worry about finding a ride or walking, they need a quick fix to their issue that they can solve on-demand. Our innovation provides a quick, on-demand fix for the opportunity because they no longer have to worry about how they will make it to their destination on time. Customers will buy access to our bikes because their simply isn't enough parking and that will always be a need at our campus. I do not believe it will be hard to get them to switch because it is simple and cheap, which makes it much easier to get someone to use once, which is all you need to get someone invested in your company. The main competitors that we have are the local bus transportation system and the Zip Car company because they provide different opportunities that people can use to get almost exactly where they need to be. These systems are vulnerable because they require more time to use. For buses, you have to wait for the bus to arrive and it isn't always convenient for your schedule. While for Zip Car, they do not have many stations to drop off the vehicle and driving a car on campus is typically a nightmare. I would organize the business for our new innovation by hiring tech assistants that could repair any system damages within the access points and a group of bike mechanics who work on any of the bikes that are not taken care of well or are in bad shape. The main thing that we hope to focus on to gain a competitive advantage over other transportation issue companies is that my company is so Eco-friendly and that we are looking to expand into that market.

Three Minor Elements:

• My companies most important resource is its immediate accessibility and the fact that college students often demand quick services. 
• The next opportunity that I believe we could capture moving forward would be the community of people living near and around downtown because those people often need to travel much farther distances and our innovation could help with this if they used our service daily. 
• In five years, I hope to have sold my company to a friend who can push this company into other major college towns around the United States.  

Major Feedback Received:

The overall feedback I received was that my venture concept was very well constructed and that people continued to think there was a definite need for my idea. One of the comments made note of the importance of my idea being Eco-friendly. Also, one of the comments mentioned the worries of stolen bikes, which is a worry of the company. But overall, I didn't receive much negative feedback at all and didn't have much to change. 

How It Changed Because of Feedback:

In my innovation section, I made sure to include a part that described the price and how we would handle theft situations in regards to either charging their credit card with the rate of the bike or by choosing to file a police report. Many people throughout my comments noticed that I have looked to promote a Eco-friendly company and they love that, so I tried to embrace that more in my venture concept.