Venture Concept No. 1

     Opportunity: Have you ever gone to lunch with a friend at a café and by the time you’ve gotten done telling a story, your once hot food has become cold and is no longer appealing to eat? Are you tired of walking into cafes and noticing that they’re just like the ones down the block?

     I’m targeting two opportunities in cafes: how food is eaten and the atmosphere that you eat your food in.

     I’m a long-winded storyteller who could easily spend an hour eating a sandwich that would take any other person fifteen minutes. I’ve found that when I go to lunch with other people, I end up with cold food or melted ice cream way more often than I do if I’m eating by myself. While the nature of the opportunity is small, only affecting a small percentage of people, there is a long window of opportunity because I don’t think café owners are looking at their customers experience after receiving their food. Cafes today, in my opinion, are focused on providing the food and drinks people want at reasonable prices but they aren’t doing anything to distinguish their café from the competition, except for maybe a small difference in price. The cafes I’ve visited all present the same generic atmosphere and I want to do something different.

     I’ve found these problems to be more prominent in cafes located in college towns because I feel as though they were designed for the “on the go” students, as well as the general population. Gainesville, in my opinion, has an unfulfilled market for small cozy cafes where people can spend long stretches of time.

     Innovation: Through the series of assignments I’ve created an incrementally innovative solution to the problems identified above. The goal is to take a traditional café and provide an in store experience unlike any other while creating a unique twist. I want to create a café that serves everything in mugs in order to not only have food maintain its temperature better but to also use mugs as a basis in developing a cozy atmosphere. My solution is an incremental solution because I’m not making any major changes to how cafes operate, only how the food is served. What I’ve come to realize over my years of eating meals out of mugs is that the food that I have eaten out of mugs generally retains its temperature longer, which I think is because when food is in a mug, instead of on a plate, less of the food is exposed to the air and the decreased surface area means that it takes longer for the food to be affected by the temperature in the room.

     Revenue will come from the sale of food and drinks. In one round of costumer interviews I determined that people generally only visit cafes to buy drinks so it stands to reason that drink sales will comprise the majority of my revenue and also serve as one of the main elements that will draw people into the doors. I don’t currently know the price that I will be able to sell my food and drinks for because it will depend on who my suppliers are and what price I can buy my inputs for. Ideally I would like to set the prices at a rate that makes Mugged competitive with other cafes in the area.

     Venture Concept: By serving everything in mugs, food will retain its temperature longer and as a result allow people to eat their food slower and maintain a conversation with their friends without the worry of their food becoming unappealing too quickly. I personally find the use of mugs to be a cozy experience; just the act of wrapping your hands around a hot mug puts me in a better mood.

     I expect that the aspect of my café that will draw people in, will be the atmosphere that will be created because there isn’t currently any cafes that I’m aware of that provide a cozy small town atmosphere. My small employee base will help to reinforce my ideal atmosphere by creating the organizational culture I discussed in a previous post. If my café is established in a prime location than it will likely make customers more inclined to visit my café since a majority of people tend to visit the most convenient café. My competition is the large array of currently established cafes in the Gainesville area. If my main focus is college aged students than Starbucks would be my largest competition simply because they are located on campus and are therefore the most convenient café for most people. In order to make myself the most competitive I can, I need to have my prices in the same ballpark as other successful cafes and be in an easily accessible location to draw in potential costumers.

     As mentioned in a previous post, http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/03/my-unfair-advantage.html, my greatest advantage is that I want to create an organizational culture that fosters a relationship between costumers and employees. By having this goal in mind when initially developing my idea, it allows me to tailor my café to support my ideal culture more easily than someone who already has a functioning café.

     As I discussed in the Amazon Whisperer assignment, http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/03/amazon-whisperer.html, I’m not totally sure what direction I want the café to move towards once it’s established. I’ve entertained the idea of adding a to-go option as a way to increase the number of potential customers, by targeting people on the go, but worry that they wont get to experience what my café is really offering.

     Assuming I launched this café, in five years I hope to still run Mugged by surviving the difficult first couple years. Long term, I have no interest in making Mugged a chain coffee shop or franchising because I feel that if we did expand we would loose some of elements that I’m currently working to achieve. I just hope to continue to improve the menu and the experience.