Opportunity assessment for 'YPlan' Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Opportunity assessment for 'YPlan' - Essay Example There is a business opportunity in the last minute seat business as the theatre industry has an annual balance of 30% unsold seats, the cinema industry has 80% unsold seats while the live music industry has a balance of 40% unsold seats. The company YPlan is a young app company founded in 2012 by Rytis Vitkauskas and Viktoras Jucikas. YPlan specializes in last minute event discovery which involves alerting users of available tickets for live events happening within the next 24 hours. The events it sells include wine tasting sessions, music gigs, theatre or silent discos with all featured events handpicked by the company’s editors. The YPlan is based in London, UK, and serves the iPhone market in the city. The company was initially based in East London’s TechHub starting with two employees but grew quickly recruiting 17 employees in the process and shifted its base to King’s Cross. The company plans to expand internationally to other markets where the iPhone penet ration is huge like the US and Japan. YPlan seeks to exploit a gap in the entertainment market by being the first app company to provide an efficient means of purchasing last minute nights out tickets. The founders have experience in the software industry and have a long history of entrepreneurship. Rytis, for example, has previously worked at Summit Partners where he was responsible for software and technology investments. He contributed to the sourcing, execution and management of summit investments in Acturis and Avast software (Baron 2012). Challenges in the app business The company’s services were only available in London as of Jan 2013, but it looks to expand its business to American cities. The app market is crowded and competitive; it is hard for most entrepreneurs to break through. The popularity of apps changes quite often; therefore, entrepreneurs have to be conversant with the latest trends in the industry (Chell 2004). To launch a successful app entrepreneurs hav e to acquire the relevant technology appropriate to a particular platform. If the entrepreneur intends to launch the app on different platforms, then he/she needs to purchase a platform specific developer license for each platform. Platforms are in general mutually incompatible, with each having unique technical detailing and coding. The coding and testing stage requires the services of experienced app developers and software engineers. The app developer also needs sound designers, graphic designers and content developers, in addition to, an effective marketing and PR team. The company does not offer a filtering system to sort between different types of events like music gigs and theatre.   Some competitors like Hotel tonight appeal to customers with discounted rates for their services while Yplan offers discounts for only some of the events (Chell 2004). Other competitors like Groupon use coupons to advertise various products including sales of tickets to a wide range of events a t highly discounted rates. This could impact on Yplan’s bottom-line as its services are restricted to subscriber-only app based marketing. Groupon’s customers need not own a smart phone in order to buy its products. Groupon has also negotiated lucrative deals with various American companies and this could be a hurdle to Yplan’s strategy of entering the American market. For instance, Groupon have partnered with the MLB to sell tickets to its games. Opportunities and product differentiation