Venture Concept No. 1

Opportunity:
The new venture I'm discussing is a matching service for people and their ideal cleaning products. I'm using the information I found from interviews from previous assignments. Before this assignment, six different interviews had taken place with six different people chosen at random.
-Who has the need? The need for this service extends to pretty much everyone who lives on their own or is responsible for some of the cleaning duties of their household. However, this service is mostly needed by busy, middle-class individuals who are conscious of the price spent on cleaning products and restricted by a busy schedule.
-Nature of the need? This is a consumer need. It will be a program the has reviews, different price points, and matching systems to match the ideal cleaning product with each consumer.
Forces in the environment creating this opportunity is the constant invention and updating of cleaning products, leading to a larger and larger market of things to choose from. An example of this would be vacuums. Just from a simple Google search of "Dyson vacuums," there are at least ten different models that come up and even though there are some immediately noticeable differences, many are variations of the same model. This market is slightly different geographically due to the type of environment outside. For example, If someone lives in Oklahoma, they will need cleaning products able to deal with the red clay or the region while if you're living in New York City, this would't be a problem. Customers are currently satisfying their need by Online searching for product reviews and by word of mouth. Sometimes, specialized stores give demonstrations of the product, but there is nowhere currently that offers all of these services in one place. I feel as if this opportunity is relatively large, strictly because as long as people have their own living spaces, there will always be a need to clean them up. Also, the window of opportunity here isn't really something to worry about either because of the previous reason.
Innovation:
The product here is a matching service for consumers and cleaning supplies/ tools. Ideally, this would be some sort of app or online website. There would be a questionnaire when a new member signs up, which would have questions about their location, lifestyle, amount of pets and children, type of flooring and appliances in their house, etc. Then, based on these answers, there would be different categories the customer could choose from to look through. Some of the categories would be Vacuums, Kitchen, Outdoor Maintenance, etc. Under each of the tabs would be t=a list of ranked supplies or products that we believe the consumer would benefit from, with the highest match listed first and then lower matches listed in descending order. Under each individual product, there would be customer reviews, other linked products maybe used with the product, and videos of the tool in use. There would also be a set up in the app for online ordering for anything listed. This is part of where revenue comes in, I would arrange a commission from the actual companies selling the product off of everything sold, as well as getting a cut from product advertisements.
Venture Concept:
I feel as if customers would want to buy this innovation because it's a time-saver, and it's personalized so as to eliminate the need for having to return defective products or buyer dissatisfaction. I think customers would switch to this service because it would be approved by the seller companies rather that being a new brand altogether, and it brings all aspects of household shopping to one place. Because of this, I think there would be a relatively low level of difficulty in getting customers to switch. As far as competitors go, by having ads from the seller companies on my app I would hope to eliminate competition from that front. The only other competition I feel would be any in person appliance stores, for example, a Maytag store selling refrigerator filters and things like that. My layout of my app would play a big role in the overall success of the product. The design would have to be very bright and clean, as well as overall being user friendly and not hard to operate or to get help with (tutorials, help buttons, etc.). In order to support the "business," I would need to have product researchers and testers, as well as demographic/geographic surveyors working pretty regularly in order to keep up with customer needs and with the release of new products from the seller companies. Ideally, I feel as if a team of maybe ten employees were to work together, all of this and more could easily be accomplished. They would each get a cut from the overall app profits.
Three minor elements:
1- The most important aspect of this product is its personalization to the customers and the ability to save so much time in shopping and advertising.
2- The next thing for this venture would be the actual launching of an app. A possible next app revolving around the same general idea as this one would maybe be with healthcare products. The difficulty in this idea would come with working with healthcare providers, and some of the materials would not be able to be sold by a third-party seller, so there might be more planning hangups with that idea.
3- What's next for me after this venture is possibly more work into research. All of the research and interviews that have gone into this idea was really fun and eye opening for me. While I may not be a huge entrepreneur in the future on my own, I would maybe choose to opt for being a part of the research department for other budding ideas that I decide to be a part of.