29A- Venture Concept No. 2

1) Venture Description 

Opportunity 
The opportunity when it comes target audience for my business is college students. In my previous venture concept I talked about University of Florida students alone, but now I believe the audience can be any college students since the issue is common. The nature of the need is critical due to how many students have to purchase textbooks each semester with not a lot of funds for it. The changes in the environment creating this opportunity are new classes each semester that the students are taking. In many cases, students are required to take new classes each semester that ties directly to their major. Demographically, the market falls under young adults and geographically across the United States at college campuses. Customers are currently satisfying the need by purchasing textbooks from the school bookstores or online in places such as Amazon. I would say they are not extremely loyal to whatever they use now because if a cheaper alternative is present for them most students would switch and go with that. This opportunity can be very large due to the significant amount of students across the United States and the need for textbooks. This window of opportunity will be open for as long as universities continue to operate which I believe will be for a significant amount of time.
Innovation
The innovation that I have come up with is a textbook service for students across the US at universities. My company will provide cheaper costs than the campus bookstore with textbooks and will have many options to obtain them. What I mean by this is having the option to purchase new, purchase used, or rent textbooks for just the time they are taking the class. Not only will the company be selling textbooks, a unique thing that it will have is a trade in service with previous owned textbooks that students have. Students can bring in old textbooks and trade them in for cash value or store credit that can go to whatever books they need next for their classes. For example, a student can bring in their calculus 1 textbook and trade it in for store credit with the value of  $100. This $100 can go to their calculus 2 textbook needed for the upcoming semester which costs $230 totaling out to only $130. This saves the student $100 dollars that can go to future textbooks like this one or they can take cash value for other activities they want to spend it on. The company will make money buy students purchasing textbooks and renting them out for each semester. Textbooks new will be cheaper than the bookstore prices and used books will be fairly priced for the students. Renting will be significantly cheaper than both new and used prices so students can save a lot of money.
Venture Concept
The innovation will solve and address students issues with textbooks across the United States at universities. There are many benefits to using this service for textbooks as it will save students a lot of money each semester and will be convenient for them. Customers would switch from purchasing at the bookstore to my company due to the lower prices and options of obtaining books my company would have. With the three options of getting their textbooks, the student has a choice rather than just the option of buying new at the bookstore. At first it will be difficult to get students to switch just due to the start up of the business. Once the company starts to succeed and people like using the service a positive reputation will go out and generate more business. The competitors would be the campus university bookstore and online sources such as amazon or bookstores online. The weaknesses of the bookstore are that they only offer new textbooks and have high costs with them. For online sources, the weaknesses are people have to wait on shipping or if they rent will have to ship the book back rather than just dropping it off at my business. The customer experience and price points play a major role in my business concept as it would strive for both to generate business. Employee staff would be around 10 members to run the business's day to day operations and marketing team. The roles would be front desk, marketing, and management.

2) Summary of Feedback 
The feedback that I received on my first concept post is to make sure I continue to distinguish my business from places such as Amazon and provide something that they cant, along with twisting the existing market and making it better. Also in my feedback is to focus more broadly rather than just UF students alone. I did not receive any feedback on my what's next post so all I have to talk about is the first venture post I had.

3) How I changed Concept 
I changed my venture concept to more of a general focus rather than specific at UF based off the feedback. In my feedback I learned to focus on distinguishing my business from places such as Amazon or the bookstore and do things to make mine special. For this post I focused on staying to all college students and multiple universities rather than just focusing on UF students and UF.