Foodture

 

Name: Qing Ma NYU affiliation: Gallatin NYU status: Undergraduate

Did you enter last year?: No Do you have any teammates?: No How many, including yourself?:

 

Concept Name

Foodture

 

High Concept Statement

The “System” in the TV show Black Mirror’s but for friendship!! (Episode “Hang the DJ”)  – Friendship with a purpose

 

Status Quo

The problem is that it is hard to meet people that we like and people are constantly looking for friends, especially for introverts, college freshmen, international students, and people at work. But while there are many dating apps now, there isn’t an effective platform to easily connect people who share similar skills, hobbies and life goals – And we believe friendship is built upon meaningful conversations and shared goals/interests. People link hooking up with current dating apps. Endless “swiping feature” in these apps failed to help people find someone that matches each individual’s specific interest and facilitate conversation from messaging to meeting up with people in the real world. Dating apps are there to kill time, and the app itself is time-consuming.

 

Competition

People are using meetups.com to meet people with shared interests but it requires someone to organize the event. People are also using social media like facebook, instagram etc to stay connect with people. People are using Tinder to meet new friends but usually for dating and hooking up. People are using excel sheet or google form to find others who have the skills they are looking for (e.g. CmC challenge teammate hunt excel sheet).

 

Solution

We focuses on building an app that matches people with similar hobbies, skills, and  life goals. We help facilitate meet ups by incorporating a social calendar in the app and providing restaurant, movie, and event suggestions that matches with their interests. We incentivize people to meet up by providing discount coupons through our in-app purchase feature. We also let people tag restaurant location and name at their “moments” when they post pictures so others who see the post could quickly make dinner/event plans with and send invitation to friends in the app! Furthermore, when it comes to skills and hobbies, gender, race, religion plays very little role in the process of friends making.

 

Revenue Model

Think of Groupon. Our in-app purchase option direct our customers to restaurants, festivals, and venues. We do marketing for these merchants. Merchants provide discount to customers and we charge a commission from it. We could also monetize our user data to predict market trends. Because this is a skill and hobby based app, we could also add in mentorship/classes option in the future!

 

Which platform would you like to launch your app on?

iPhone

 

Which category best describes your app?

Social Networking