The Food Compass

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

Fundamental Problem

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

The Food Compass app lets users easily share their food preferences (profile), including food allergies and dietetic requirements, with meal planners and reservation makers such as: friends and family, party planners, hotel concierges, travel agents, office assistants and fitness trainers.  Currently, those meal planners and/or reservation makers have little, if any, knowledge of their intended diners’ personal food preferences, making food or meal selection difficult.  

The Food Compass helps those audiences better serve their clientele.

View Prototype / WebsiteView OEP Final Report / Written Analysis

Business Model

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

Although the Food Compass app is free to download, the company will generate income from other revenue streams. They are:

• Premium Features / In-App Purchases• $4.99 monthly subscription for total premium membership,

or• $1.99 monthly fee, per premium feature

• Advertising Sales• Sponsorships• Deals / Coupons• White Label / Licensing Fees

More Details on Revenue Model

Sales & Marketing Strategy

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

In order to generate product awareness, the following marketing elements represent priorities in our go-to-market strategy:

• Social Media• Remnant (discount) Advertising• Email / Content Marketing• Publicity• Trade Shows

More Details on Marketing

Risk

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

Out biggest concern centers upon the market risks involved with reaching critical mass quickly.

It is imperative that we launch strong with a solid sales, marketing and publicity strategy to garner huge buy-in from the meal planners and reservation makers. This target audience is critical for driving “share requests” to the general public, helping to build brand awareness.

Ease of use when it comes to user interface is another top priority, ensuring that profile creation is quick and easy for the general public.

Partners & Allies

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

In order to acquire exclusive rights as the official profile sharing network with established industry leaders, we will explore options such as revenue sharing as well as licensing/leasing fees based on our partners outreach to prospective clients.

The Food Compass targets high-value partnerships with companies that provide meal services to a business-critical market and share the same channels.

Sales Partners:• Event Planners / Party Planners• Dietitians / Nutritionists / Fitness Trainers / Health Clubs• Travel Agencies• Hotels / Concierge Services• Office Assistants • Relocation Services

Partners & Allies

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

(cont’d)

Platform Partners: 

The mobile app component of Food Compass is intended to be delivered in partnership with the largest mobile content delivery comprised of the Apple iTunes App Store (catering to iOS devices) and the Google Play Store (reachable by mobile devices running the Android OS) to keep development costs low. Both platforms, combined, offer the widest reachable target audience at the cost of 30% of the sale price (for paid apps), while offering free hosting and content delivery for free apps.

The web backend service component of the Food Compass would be targeted for hosting and delivery through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform.

More Details on Partnerships

Funding

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

We will seek initial outside funding from Venture Capital for 2.5 million. We anticipate that it would take approximately two years of development and deployment efforts in specific target markets before the Food Compass is able to acquire an installed base of 10M users. At this point, total annual operating expenses would be estimated in the range of $1.02M.

We anticipate revenue from premium application users (assuming a conversion rate from free usage of ten percent and a single premium feature offered at $1.99 each or $4.99 per month for all features) to be $1.4M minimum. Annual advertising revenue from the free application usage (assuming $1 eCPM and 200,000 active users each day, from an installed base of 10M total users), is estimated at $72,000.

We find that the Food Compass application and profile sharing service is economically viable and highly profitable once operations are scaled to multiple target markets, along with the inclusion of several premium features that cater to specific niche applications within these markets.

More Details on Costs

Team

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

We anticipate requiring 5 team members for the Food Compass startup (consisting of two founders and not including mentors).

Food Compass combines a mobile application front-end with a web backend service connecting end-users and their clients. Once Food Compass has acquired an established user base in a targeted market (estimated one year following launch), mobile application development on two major platforms (iOS and Android) would require two full-time developers (one of which is a founder), with a third full-time resource for the web services platform. Food Compass would additionally require one full-time resource in charge of sales and marketing (another founder), and the operations would benefit from a dedicated resource for administrative support.

We estimate wages and benefits to cost, on average, approximately $125,000 per resource per year, for a total annual cost of $625,000 per year.

Class Team Members

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

Connie Hammond - Profile on Venture LabParticipation:  Team Lead, OAP, OEP, Final Project Sameer Aidoor - Profile on Venture LabParticipation:  OAP, OEP, Final Project Manish Agarwal - Profile on Venture LabParticipation:  OAP

Noman Muhammad - Profile on Venture LabParticipation:  OAP

Ashwini Kumar - Profile on Venture LabParticipation:  OAP

Team Profile Page on Venture Lab

The Food Compass

Instantly Share Your Food Preferences with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers