REACH AND OPERATIONS
Reach
Our main target audience is those who have allergies who enjoy eating out at different restaurants. Most people these days discover new restaurants through the Internet and word of mouth. We will put our app on the app store and we will also have a website. We want to use the combination of Internet and traditional media​​ when it comes to advertising our app. Since our app crowd sources information in order to collect data on the accuracy of restaurants, we could collaborate with food bloggers who happens to have a food allergies to promote our app, and to write reviews for other restaurants.
Since our app requires restaurants who want to be a part of our app to register and add their menus, we could use restaurants to help spread the world on our app. Restaurants sign up with our restaurants have could have a sticker that says "Allergy Approved by Safe Tastes", similar to how Yelp has restaurants who are partnered with them, have a sticker that says "Yelp Approved" on their stickers. Then, we would take money to spend on traditional forms of media, such as social media advertisements. We would choose to host ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, in order to get our app to reach our target audience. We would also host ads on these websites/apps in order to get our app out into the world.
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Through our advertising efforts, we plan on reaching 600 restaurants in 6 months, reaching approximately 10,000 users with food allergy concerns.
Operations with Restaurants
When it comes to getting our data, we will design and implement Amazon Web Services to store valuable information about each user and each restaurant. This data is available through our in-house developed API. By sending requests and informational messages to restaurants in urban cities across the country, our restaurant data will continue to grow. Our first beta user test should check the accuracy of the menu information and will keep them up to date. We will require registered menus to update their restaurant menus on a monthly basis. We will ask only for a picture of a restaurant's current menu and an update of precautions in the kitchen, in exchange for a small amount of targeted advertisements. When it comes to ensuring the accuracy of our data, our team is responsible for collaborating with restaurants to provide accurate menu information. Our users can also share any negative or positive experiences to better the accuracy within the Safe Tastes community
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Daily Operations
In our first month, our team will focus on building APIs and database. We will hold most of our meetings online, at a co-founders home, or in a coffee shop.. After launch and after we gain enough funding, our team should work together in a rented office in Seattle.
In regards to equipment, our workplace requires computers, that has software tools to fix bugs, add features, design the UI, check marketing and business analytics, and manipulates data from our server.
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Like every other tech team, our company has three teams: engineering, marketing, and management. Our engineering team is responsible for developing and designing our product. Our engineering team consists of developers, designers, product managers, and database maintenance professionals. The skill sets they acquire include programming and design, which are necessary to build our product. Our marketing team consists of researchers, data miners, customer support, and advertisers. The marketing team handles data analytics, research and find out the problems that could be solved. They also are capable of making strategies to increase the number of users, getting feedback from users, and figuring out how we can make a profit.
Maintaining Our Project
First of all our researchers will start doing market research in order to find new problems and collect necessary data. Then, after the market research, the designers will work on prototypes for new features based on the market results. While we are still collecting and analyzing them, developers would start building the prototype. Designers will continue to create prototypes of new features, while developers would fix bugs and integrating prototype into actual product. Our database professional will handle the operation of database ensuring the data is secure and accurate. Our marketing team will then reach out to customers, develop new marketing strategies, and handle customer service problems from the users.