The initial vertical we're focusing on is college students and restaurant vendors in the local area around each college. There are 22 million college students in the US, and 4,000+ colleges. Each of these students goes out to eat 1-2x per week on average. This represents hundreds of millions of dollars as an initial revenue opportunity.

For our 1st vertical, colleges, the biggest competitors are very well known search-based services that provide consumers with retail locations close by to their location when they look up the category — e.g. ‘restaurants close by.’ Delivery services are also secondary competitors. But search-based services do not ensure consumers actually go to the retail outlet, while delivery services focus on home delivery. OodlesDeals focuses on bringing consumers to the retail outlet to have an enjoyable experience.

The majority of retail vendors are unsophisticated in their online and mobile marketing strategies. Some of them have unnecessarily made their core strength, like the investment in their bricks-and-mortar outlets, into a core weakness. We help our vendor-partners acclimatize and win with the new normal of mobile + bricks-and-mortar being the ideal omnichannel experience for the consumer of today.

Trying to do too much too fast. It is critical we understand and prioritize the key factors that drive consumer behavior. This is why both our co-founders spend as much time (60% each week) at the actual Universities we’ve launched at. Both of us talk to students and vendors every day and understand their pain points and how we can make our solution better & easier each day to solve these pain points.

Each step of the three-step patent-pending process we’ve developed is monetizable when talking about the deals on our app. Advertising to students is another area we see opportunity, as we are both able to micro-segment to each consumer and message them exactly what they would personally want. Our 1:1 relationship with each consumer also means we can talk to them directly. The events we execute also have long-term monetization possibilities. These monetization tracks are only viable because we provide true value to both consumers and our vendor-partners.

We utilize on-campus student ambassadors to make students aware of our app. We supplement this street team approach with social advertising, event sponsorship, & vendor support. Assuming the deals & events on the app are compelling enough, the students download and use the app thereafter.

Our three-tier process is patented. See our investment deck for more detail. Importantly, the three-tiers are not about price, but about getting people together to have fun, with value increasing the more they do together. This is unique in the industry and is also a sustainable strategy for the long-term.

Please see the “Yr 2017 In Review” update we posted in February 2018 for the milestones we’ve reached with the initial round of money raised on Wefunder.

Our goal is to expand to up to 15 Universities. Please see the investment deck embedded in our Wefunder site for specific growth plans and associated investment needs & costs. We’ve brought on a new University every two months this past year, a general trend we plan on maintaining, with summer and winter holidays being outliers.

Expansion up to 15 Universities is the reason for this next round of funding. Student awareness & sign-up, vendor recruitment, and product enhancement will be our three primary areas of focus.

The model we’ve established in the first three Universities -- vendor sign-up via Business Development activities, student sign-up via social advertising, street team efforts, events sponsorship, and (overall) product enhancement through customer and consumer feedback -- is what we plan on replicating. We know per University set-up costs, student acquisition costs, and time and effort required to recruit vendors, as that’s what the majority of focus in-field this past year has been all about.