29A – Venture Concept No. 2

UNIMEET

The Opportunity:
College students across the nation are struggling to make friends in an increasingly digital age. Because of this, they are forced to join Greek Life with high costs or wait for new semesters and classes to meet people. This market exists in all college campuses and exists mainly among women, but men are included. Customers are loyal to Greek Life, if they are a part of it. This opportunity is big, as it hits millions of students. This window of opportunity will be open until someone creates a solution.

The Innovation:
Unimeet, my solution to this issue, is an online college student friendship app. It allows users to meet each other, dating app style, by swiping and chatting. Profit will be generating by using advertisements and by having local restaurant/business sponsored events. For example, an escape room can host a discount "unimeet-up" and have people meet there in person for the first time for safety purposes.

The Venture Concept:
My app will solve the opportunity I identified because it helps college students make friends. Advertisers will pay to promote on this app because they are able to target people based off of their location, which is incredibly valuable for advertisers. I believe customers will use this product because of the way dating apps have become normalized. The competitors are existing general friend apps, like Bumble's friend setting and TinderU. These apps, though, having a dating foundation, which make people skeptical of the users' intentions. The User Interface and marketing is most important for the business concept, as it will likely be the core of the business's success/failure. I would start this business with myself and two others, each being a developer and a market researcher.

My most important resource will be my background in social media marketing, as it can be useful for driving users to the app. While it can be copied by hiring a social media marketer, my extensive experience will make it hard to copy our exact methods.

The next opportunity would be to expand internationally and reach campuses across the globe.

In five years, I hope to have expanded to other markets. The main goal at this point would be to expand to people in a non-college setting. This would likely mean starting out in high schools and middle schools. The next step would be to sell this business to an existing social media app like Facebook and Twitter.

In five years I hope my venture has not failed and exists on all major college campuses across the nation. As an entrepreneur, I hope to be learning, growing, and creating in the next decade, which means I will make sure I do what it takes to make my venture unique and successful.

People recommended I look into where my app can earn money. They expressed concern regarding excessive advertisements and that this may turn off potential users from my app. While I understand, I do think advertisements are the route to go with social media and networking apps. I don't think users would be willing to pay a few to download this app and I can control the amount of ads to make it not overwhelming. Others suggested expanding globally and to high schools and middle schools. I incorporated this in my plan now. I changed my venture concept to make it hit larger audiences due to my feedback.