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Economics and Business Student Association, Winter Quarter 2023 - Topic: Entrepreneurship
Placed 1st Amongst 14 Teams
Utilized Figma and Canva to create an app prototype dedicated to users ages 24-42 to maximize reward programs throughout a 8 week timeline, as the Case Competition Lead for a team of 6.
Description of Winter Quarter Prompt:
Introduction
A group of angel investors and venture capitalists are hosting a competition to inspire more undergraduate entrepreneurs and help them launch their ideas into startups. Your team has secured an opportunity to pitch your business idea at this upcoming Entrepreneurship Conference for a chance to win a $75,000 grant to go towards your startup. The competition is designed for projects that are in either the concept or pilot phase, meaning those that have not yet started regular operations and/or those that are testing initial concepts through basic pilot operations. There will be many teams of aspiring entrepreneurs presenting their cases on the same night and only one team with the most compelling idea will be able to secure funding.
Goal
Build a creative and implementable business idea and convince the judges to invest in your startup.
Full Slidedeck Below!
Points Guy App
Focuses only on travel related rewards
Sphera
All Rewards
Easy to View
Market Research + Data
About 87% of credit card users have a card that gives them rewards
But, about 70% of rewards card holders have rewards, miles, or points that are unused
40% of these card holders haven’t even used a single reward point in the past calendar year
Out of those who did redeem rewards, around 71% of them redeemed cash back rewards
However, only 21% used gift card or merchandize rewards, 12% used hotel rewards, and 12% used flight miles
Visa: 335 million cards, 52.8% market share
Mastercard: 200 million cards, 31.6% market share
Discover: 51.4 million cards, 8.1% market share
American Express: 47.5 million cards, 7.5% market share
Competitors
MaxRewards
Analyzes your spending habits to recommend credit cards with offers that fit your spending
Assists with earning cash back rewards
Tracks your spending towards bonuses like sign up offers
The Points Guy App
Tracks your previous spending, and can tell you which cards to use at different places to maximize your rewards or cash back
Users can also track their hotel rewards points with this app
Has a feature that allows users to spend their rewards points on flight
Mint
Budgeting app that keeps track of your financial information in one place to give you an overview of your finances
Can sync bank accounts, credit cards, money management accounts, retirement/investment accounts, and other financial accounts
Tracks your transactions and sorts them into different categories
Tracks savings each and every day, shows you your top accounts!
Personalized Recommendations for Users
What is Sphera?
Our app, Sphera can track and redeem points from a variety of companies. With an algorithm that utilizes user spending history and preferences, Sphera gives users personal recommendations to optimize usage on rewards.
Our 4 main pages highlight our 3 key features, maximizing rewards, notifications, and the recommendations feature. Our minimal viable product would be first developing the recommendation feature, where we utilize the algorithm to provide the optimal way to spend their rewards. These can be seen in the slides below!
Sphera’s Business Model
Business to Consumer model with a website and mobile application
Online intermediary and advertising based revenue model
Three revenue streams
Partnership with firms to promote their business by encouraging reward claims (Brokerage fees)
Understanding customer spending to recommend rewards programs that provide greater savings
Utilizing customer data to curate better reward program in collaboration with issuers
Sphera’s Consumer Profile
Young professionals, new to credit cards/investments or looking for ways to better their own credit card habits
24-42. Millennials and older Gen Z, some Gen X
68% of millennials want cards with rewards like cash-back, points and miles. In fact, another study by CNBC Make It found that 59% of Millennials use credit cards solely for the rewards they offer.
Sphera’s AI Software
Plaid
It is a data transfer network that will power our account linking. Most of the existing transfer partners already use Plaid to integrate services. Secure system to handle financial data and transactions.
AI Recommendation System
Our algorithm receives and utilizes user spending history and preferences. Based on this data, the AI tool provides a personalized recommendation to the user. Our app would have an AI platform based on a “content and collaborative” based model. It would utilize keywords to identify spending categories. This collaborative model finds the relationship between current spending categories and a particular product.
Allocation of $75,000
App Development
Hosting Server: $320/month
Zoho Creator software: $4,800
Plaid software: $6,000
Testing & Deployment: $15,000
Design: $20,000
Development & QA: $25,000
Legal
Paperwork & Fees: $890
Website domain: $1,000
Security testing: $20,000
Marketing
Instagram: $300/month
Influencers: $12,000
Marketing team: $15,000
Total: $127,130, the $75,000 grant prioritizes app development.
