Venture concept 24

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.