This is the business model of an app we call “Pick”. After creating it, we (me, @bilsayyildirim and @mracconci) found a very similar already existing app and decided to move on with another idea.

Business model

Imagine you are in a shop, trying to decide between two shoes to buy, or trying to decide between three dresses to get as a gift to your partner, and you need some others’ opinions at that moment. The problem is there is no good way and this is our model’s B2C value.

On B2B, we think retail companies have limited mobile engagement with users when it comes to getting opinions and feedback on their existing and prototype products.

The potential customers are people who value others’ opinions most, so teenagers are on the top of our list. Companies are also our potential customers: imagine displaying two types of shoes that are candidates for production, and asking for opinions. In return, they would get brand presence plus massive opinion data from people on various demographics.

Getting instant opinions from a huge sample of people that you don’t normally have access to is our unique value proposition.

Our solution is an app, in which users can upload two or more pictures of anything, and post it to others who will chose one of the images. The user/uploader will then be able to see which picture was voted the most.

The channels to distribute the app is somewhat typical, with the focus of getting the attention of tech websites and blogs.

By paying a very low amount of money (say 0.5p), the user will be able to prioritise his post, so that it will appear instantly to all users. This way the user will get feedback much faster. To companies, we will sell meta-data of voters, ie. this age group living in this city voted for this picture the most.

Our costs are pretty slim, as we are developers ourselves.

Key metrics are directly related to app usage, the most important ones are uploads/day and votes/day.

Our competitive advantages are not as strong, but we assume our customer base and already existing deals with companies should make it hard for others to enter the market.

Combining these all, we can see the complete business model:

Interface

Voting needs to be easy, fun and addictive as no votes mean no business. We planned a Tinder-like interface where the user sees two or more pictures on their screen, taps on the one that they like the most, and then swipe for the next card. This would make voting very easy. To make it fun, we planned some gamification which uses would gain badges and rewards. A badge can be “top fashion voter”, and a reward could be “promote your post for free”.

We also planned to have Instagram-like hashtag-categories, where users would upload the post to a category, and others who are checking out that category would see the post. We’re sure there could be some topics (like sports) that are of no interest to many others.

Existing alternatives and conclusion

There are tons opinion apps, many of them text-based, but it was Voto that made us abandon this business model. It’s the only app that we found that is very similar to our ideas, and it was this business model which made us clear on what we want to build, thus see the similarities. Although we are aware that first-movers have certain disadvantages, Voto is so similar that we didn’t see much point in implementing an app that solves a problem that’s addressed properly.