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.

1. Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

2. 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 / Website
View OEP Final Report / Written Analysis
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

3. 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
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

4. 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
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

5. 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.
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

6. 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
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

7. (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
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

8. 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
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

9. 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.
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

10. Connie Hammond - Profile on Venture Lab
Participation: Team Lead, OAP, OEP, Final Project
Sameer Aidoor - Profile on Venture Lab
Participation: OAP, OEP, Final Project
Manish Agarwal - Profile on Venture Lab
Participation: OAP
Noman Muhammad - Profile on Venture Lab
Participation: OAP
Ashwini Kumar - Profile on Venture Lab
Participation: OAP
Team Profile Page on Venture Lab
Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers

11. Instantly Share Your Food Preferences
with Meal Planners and Reservation Makers