Customer Problem:

Young people have a lot of things to spend money on, but the amount of money they have is always limited. For example, if a student wants to buy a new lens for his camera, he would probably not buy that lens because he has several more important things to spend on.

He won't get money from his dad for the lens let alone going to a fundraising site to raise money.

Now he can get that money by writing a pitch and getting votes by his friends. We’ve designed Papafund to be a fun thing to try out. 

Target Market:

The market is worldwide and has a concentration among young people between the ages of 18 and 30.

A major market segment are college students and recent graduates who are always short on income, have tons of aspirations and are fond of using social media.

There may be some geographical locations which do not allow their residents to take part in contests. Such exceptions may apply.

Business Model:

Papafund has individual contests (rounds) of 150 participants each.

Users pay $10 to submit a pitch and compete. Since each round has 150 participants, each round gives us $1500. After expenditures of the winner's money and transaction fees etc, we have a gross income of $410 per round.

Since 150 users reach out to their friends for votes, we get good traffic plus referred pitch submitters. This promises exponential growth via social media.

Customers:

Our customers are people who have hobbies and have tons of things to spend money on, but the amount of money they have is limited.

We are targeting these customers to help them fulfill their passions through a fun contest.

Sales and Marketing Strategy:

Users share their pitch with their friends to get votes on it. If we assume that each user reaches out to 100 friends through social media and that only 3 people among them decide to submit a pitch too, we get 450 new pitches through this 3% growth rate.

This means 1 round gives us 3 rounds, 3 give us 9 and they give us 27 rounds and then 27 give us 81 and these 81 give us 243 and so forth.

The gamification in the contest will retain users.

The Snowball Effect:

Users share their pitch to get votes by their friends. The more people they reach the more traffic on Papafund, thus high possibility of pitch submissions by voters.

Competitors:

We have no competitors who work on the model we work on. There are crowdfunding websites through which users have to raise 'money'. On the other hand, we help them earn money by raising 'support' through a fun contest.

Plus, online fundraising websites focus on charity or idea/business genres. We focus on funding hobbies, passions and interests.

Competitive Advantage:

Our unique process is protected by a pending patent with the USPTO.

We have the first mover advantage on the internet for introducing a platform that funds passions, interests and hobbies. Furthermore, we also have a first mover advantage when it comes to our patent-pending process of raising 'support' in contrast to raising 'money'.