24A - Venture Concept No. 1

Opportunity

· Business professionals that utilize business cards to establish contacts for future business opportunities.

· The need is not focused on the business card itself but rather what data and feedback the contact card can provide to the customer.

· Business cards today generate almost $400 million dollars in revenue. From the 10 billion cards that are printed, approximately 8 billion are thrown in the trash.

· The market opportunity is broad since this is a global issue. However, the problem can be solved with a narrower focus to get things off the ground – such as Trade Show Sales people in the US.

· Today the need is satisfied by individuals using manual processes, if they even track them, to monitor how many contacts they received from distributing their business cards.

· Given there are 10 billion business cards created in the US alone I would conservatively estimate the market to be approximately 10 – 30 billion users.

· I believe this problem will be solved within the next 5 years.

Innovation

· The product will not only retain contacts that would otherwise be lost due to end users that receive business cards throwing them away.

· The real power behind the product is the performance reporting. Business professionals will be able to tell when their contact information was used, who reviewed it, what did they review, how long, and other details a static paper business card cannot provide.

· Individuals will download the application from an Android or Apple store initially. I will only launch in one for the MVP. There will be a simple setup procedure for the user to enter their contact information. Individuals that would like to receive a business card will be given a QR code to scan if they do not have the app (which they likely won’t until market saturation occurs). Once they have the app individuals can accept contact cards from anyone that has the app. The distributor of the contact card will be able to record a customized message for the recipient along with personal notes they can record for recall. The real power will be noticed through the performance tracking within the app. The business owner will be able to see how many times someone has viewed their contact information after they have distributed it. Who looked at it. Recall the conversation they had with that individual and all conversations that may have occurred in the past.

· How will you make money from it (what are you selling and for how much)?

· Revenue generation from the app is still an open question. However, this is a good thing as there are multiple models to choose from. The app itself will be downloaded for free. This way there’s no initial cut to pay to 3rd parties like Apple or Google. Right now, the thought is to allow the sharing of the business contacts for free as the initial creation is what costs money on the app and not sharing (sending) the information. We are still deciding on a Freemium model or a model that will expose more feature/functionality for paid vs. free users.

Venture Concept

· My innovation will solve the lack of feedback provided by paper stock business cards by turning them into digital contact cards that can track usage.

· Why will customers buy my innovation

· Customers will buy my innovation because they will be able to determine how and when their contact cards are performing.

· Customers will switch to my product because they will be able to define the right customer to distribute their business cards too. They will be able to use data to figure out what type of customer responds vs. those that just take the business card and throw it way.

· Since the contact card will be digital and most (if not all) of these individuals use smart phones I don’t see a problem with them switching from paper to digital.

· There are some smaller companies out there pursuing this opportunity, but the biggest competition is Vistaprint. They have a tight grip on the paper business market today and if they get their act together and focus on digital it will be hard for entrepreneurs like me to compete. Because they are so big is also a weakness – it takes much longer for them to turn things around and test in the market.

· Pricing is a big component to this venture. It is inexpensive today to buy business cards which is one of the reasons the industry hasn’t changed. Distribution is key as it must be very easy for individuals to share their contact information. Customer experience and customer support are always important no matter what type of business you are in.

· How would you organize the business to support ongoing production? How many employees? What roles are there in the venture?

· To begin this venture, I would need to start with two individuals. One to lead the technology efforts such as coding the app and getting the website up and running. The second would be myself leading the rest of the business efforts including customer service. I would look to bring in some other partners in a short time frame as I believe time to market is key to the success of this business given the competition that already exists. Since money will be tight this will have to be investment for stake in the company. Not my ideal approach but I have a lot of people I have worked with for many years that I trust would put the business first knowing the rewards ahead.

Unfair Advantage:

· The secret sauce in this application is delivering ROI to individuals that use the product. To make this happen several components, such as the analytics, the success plan, and recording revenue gained must be integrated.

What’s Next:

· Once I have it out to a single segment, I would like to expand to another and eventually across the US.

For Me:

Five years from now I would like to have exited the business and working on a new venture.