Venture Concept
For my concept, I want to have a
service that installs separate roads specifically for scooters and other
smaller vehicles. This road would cut through a campus or any large area that
has limited roads and a lot of foot traffic. People would be able to purchase a
decal to use this road and park on it. It would, for example, cut through Plaza
of the Americas and would get students to class much more quickly and take
traffic off the roads for cars. This road can be used by faculty or by
students, and even Gainesville residents. Anyone who frequently comes through
campus could use this, but it would be mostly college students. College
students are the perfect market for this, and they are already constrained to
the area exactly where the product would be.
The value derived from this comes
from saving time that’s wasted when scooters have to deal with traffic, as well
as having safer commutes to class without having to share the road with cars.
This would be catered specifically to universities, but could work for other
areas. It would be specifically made for scooters so it would be different from
any road services. The window of opportunity will exist as long as there are
scooters and there is a college, neither of which will be going anywhere any
time soon.
To make money with this service, I
will have a decal available for purchase for $15 a month or $120 for a year.
Additional pricing options may also be considered. This would be enforced by
tickets with fines if someone uses the road without a decal.
In terms of my venture, I think that
my product isn’t exactly a new thing, so people wouldn’t have to “switch”. It
is rather a complement to what people already have: scooters for students and
faculty but also golf carts for university staff and facilities services
workers. The competitors would be if UF parking tried to do something similar,
but there are no strict competitors because this is a new kind of service. Packaging
wouldn’t be an issue because there isn’t much to package besides the decal,
which would have to lean more towards efficiency rather than good design. It would
have to be something that ticketers could see from far away but also something
that could not be copied, reproduced or forged because that would be
detrimental to sales.
Customer support would play a large
point initially, when the customer first buys the decal. It would then taper
off, but never disappear completely because customer would have to continually
renew their decals.
What’s next for my venture is
finding new markets to target outside of college students. I think there are
definitely other highly profitable markets that just require a little creative
thinking and new perspectives. I think growth could be huge for this venture,
and what evolves out of this and what we learn after the first few years can
help us expand to other schools and similar settings.
After reading more about your idea for different roads for scooters, I got a better understanding for how it would work and the system that would be used to make money. I think it is an awesome idea that would benefit students a lot, especially at UF.
ReplyDelete