Venture Concept No. 2 - Assignment 29

1) Venture Concept

Opportunity

Most college students suffer from stress and an overwhelming amount of work classes, extracurricular activities, grad school or employment search, and a demanding social life. While college students have come to accept busy schedules as the norm, they have also accepted being tired and lethargic as also being the norm. From the time we began working hard in high school or earlier, we already accepted the notion that feeling tired and rundown is simply the inevitable consequence of working hard to accomplish your goals. I believe the root cause of this presumption is imbedded in broader cultural themes and habits that contribute to feeling of tiredness, lethargy, and stress.

While a little stress goes a long way to motivating students accomplish their goals, students often find themselves overwhelmed by this stress and consequently are brought further away from the goals they have tried so desperately to achieve. Of course, being tired from working hard is inevitable, but I believe there are simple solutions to this problem that is overlooked by almost all young students as well as adults.

The largest environmental forces is the social norms that the post lunch pre dinner lull is inevitable and the solution to being tired is to pour caffeine, energy drinks, or other chemicals you can not pronounce into your body. This only exacerbates the issue at hand.

Currently, students attempt to satisfy this need by either ignoring their mental health, writing it off as normal, or trying to compensate incorrectly.

The opportunity that is found is preventing or remedying this issue is large and is pertinent to almost the entire working population that has not already found a solution to their issue that prevents them from further exacerbating this issue. The primary opportunity lies in young people as their bodies are most likely to accept being tired and push through it.

The window of opportunity for finding a solution to this issue extends well into adult life after college. I think there is a great opportunity to expand my service into the working generations and the elderly population. However, I recognize that these markets are vastly different than my original target audience, so I will need to make adjustments accordingly.

Innovation

My “innovation” is not so much an innovation but instead a solution to people’s issues, but by targeting a more niche demographic, allows it to have a higher penetration rate and be more successful than competing services like mine.

My service provides college students with ideas to solve their energy issue. My company, Your Body Loves You, utilizes our human capital of employees that have spent years crafting their lifestyles to optimize their daily energy and health levels to provide college students with solutions that allow them to not have to fight against their body. We believe that your body is your best friend and is designed to work alongside you and not against you. However, your body needs you to work with it and provide it with the resources and fuel it needs to do its job: helping you live a healthy lifestyle while also working hard to accomplish your goals.

The service first attracts potential customers by our free Instagram platform that provides daily tips and blog posts centered around nutrition, fitness, and overall energy levels. At this point, followers will be enticed to sign up for our premium service where they can receive personalized counseling and plans that will allow them to reach their goals. This service is a subscription-based service that utilizes 3 month contract lengths to ensure that the customer has adequate time on the program to see results. A 6-month subscription costs around $100, just over $1 a day and our cost structure is primarily labor costs of the associates that provide for their clients.

Venture Concept

My product solves college students energy levels because it targets aspects of their lives that they are largely neglecting or not thinking about enough. For example, we believe that your nutrition, sleep, and circadian rhythms contribute the most to your daily energy levels and overall well-being. However, college students do not take these aspects seriously. Sure, everybody knows 7-8 hours sleep is ideal, but college student prioritize other things above sleep. By correcting the most impactful aspects first, Your Body Loves You is able to easily correct the largest issue contributing to people’s well-being.

Customers will want to buy this product because they have the inherent human need to care for themselves. We believe one of the largest issues college students have is that they underestimate the results they can achieve if they make minor adjustments to their daily routines. When potential customers utilize our free service through Instagram, they should begin to see improvements in their lives. Once they realize this they will want to continue improving, and this is where they have the opportunity to purchase a 3-month subscription.

My underlying service is not unique and many competitors exists. However, I differentiate due to my focus on college students and their specific needs. Understanding the uniqueness of their lifestyles is a critical component to achieving client goals.

Customer experience plays the largest part since we are promoting an overall life experience improvement, so customers should feel good the more they interact with our brands. This is even more critical when you take into account the subscription based business model of my service. If customers do not find an appropriate value proposition for the price they are paying, they will quickly cut their service.

Most important resources – Culture of improving clients well-being (benchmark success on clients success not monetary success)

Next opportunity – Potentially branching out to emotional well-being instead of mental and physical well-being

What’s next for me – I want to be able to have Your Body Loves You provide service to populations besides college students. Adults long into their successful careers need even more help living a healthy lifestyle since their bodies become more vulnerable to diseases and sickness. As an entrepreneur I want to say I made a difference in people’s lives.

2) Feedback

My feedback focused on two main areas

1.       Ensuring my customers enjoy the service enough to want to be returning customers

2.       Expanding my target audience to older generations, especially the older generation without a knowledge base of healthy habits.

I agree on the first point and it was a major focus of my original venture concept. I think that customer satisfaction will be critical as customers can easily determine if the price they are paying is appropriate for the service they are receiving.

I slightly disagree with the second point as I don’t think older generations are as willing to make lifestyle changes. Older generations grew up with no scientific knowledge of nutrition and healthy habits, so educating them is like teaching an old dog new tricks. While I know this is somewhat a negative opinion, many professional in the space (especially doctors) have no knowledge in the space, and changing their preconceived notions is a lot harder than with a younger generation.

3) Changes
My changes to my venture concept are described in the red text in my above venture concept. I took my two main areas of feedback (described in part 2) and incorporated them into the venture concept and weighed the pros and cons of each. While I think that the feedback in critical to incorporate, I should use my judgement when expanding my business to an unfamiliar target audience.

4) Illustration

This represents the multi-generation approach I can take to my business. Hypothetically, all generations represented in the below image could be a target audience for my service