Venture Concept No. 1 (Bye-Bye Vape)

Over the course of this semester I have created a service that allows for the vaping epidemic to be combatted. Deaths and illnesses caused by vaping continue to rise every single day in the United States. With my service, high school and college kids are able to get rid of their vape in exchange for their information going into a registry and a discount on their health insurance. The name of the company is Bye-Bye Vape.

The opportunity I have identified is the vaping epidemic in the United States during 2019. Since the beginning, we have seen everything from Juul giving their employees $1 million+ each in dividends, to legislation being passed that bans flavored vapes altogether. One thing is for certain, vaping is dying out and young adults don’t have a structured way to get rid of their vapes if they want to. For those high school and college kids that don’t want to get rid of them, they haven’t been incentivized enough yet either. That is where I have positioned my service. I have targeted Americans between the ages of 18-25 that have a will to get rid of their vapes, as well as trying to incentivize those who do not want to get rid of them even after legislation has been passed. The nature of the need is to end the vaping epidemic in America and help our next generation become healthier and lead better lifestyles. Customers are currently satisfying this need by throwing away their vapes. Instead of throwing them away, my company will provide them a discount on their healthcare plan, giving them a reward for quitting vaping. The opportunity here is massive. Vapes became a huge trend in the United States in 2018 and 2019. Now that the current legislation has banned some vapes, along with the rising health risks being associated with vaping, the opportunity has only grown larger. However, the window will not stay open forever. If new legislation were to be passed furthering the ban, or the ban is lifted, the window for my service to thrive will close. In order to combat this unknown timeline, action must be taken immediately in order to ensure this opportunity is taken advantage of by my company.

My service is innovative because no other service like it exists at the moment. It addresses a pressing need that can boost the health of an entire generation and end an epidemic that stains young adult’s livelihoods. My service will allow people to turn in their vapes to me, fill out some brief, secure paperwork with their insurance information, and in return they will receive a discount on their health insurance policy. Customers can stop by one of our regional locations to do so, or they can visit our website and do it all online. If choosing the online version, they will have to mail in their vape to our P.O. Box. While in this process we will not be making any money, the second phase of this plan will involve a business to business transaction. In order to make this idea profitable monetarily (by ending the vape epidemic, we are profiting from a humanity perspective), I will take my database that I have collected and market it to one of two business. The first could be a new company that is selling a product to help people deal with the aftermath of nicotine addiction. By having already done all the research for them by collecting a database of people who once had a nicotine addiction, I can sell this information to them. The other potential customer of this database are vaping companies. If the vaping ban is lifted and vaping companies improve their products, I can sell my database to these companies who are back on the market. How much the database will cost is not yet determined at this point, but it will not be cheap. An idea that has been brought up is repurposing the vapes and reselling them for profit. While a serviceable idea hasn’t been thought of yet, it is entirely possible that we could use the free inventory we are collecting to create an entirely new product to sell. 

            My innovation will solve the opportunity highlighted above by giving young Americans a structured way to get rid of their vapes that doesn’t exist yet, all while helping to save them or their parents money by getting a discount on their health insurance for making a positive lifestyle choice. It will not be hard to get customers who want to stop vaping to use my service. It will be more difficult to get customers who do not want to stop vaping to use my service, but the incentive might sway them. As of right now, there are no competitors on the market that are trying to do the same thing as my company. To start-up, I will not need an employees to work with me. If the operation is a success, I will look into hiring dedicated people to assist me with the vast amount of information being sent to our company.

            The most important resource in this venture is my relationship with the generation to which I am appealing. Having a college kid run a business that provides a service for college kids will create a sense of familiarity and form a connection that I can take advantage of when marketing my service. The next opportunity I want to tackle is creating a product from the vapes that are sent to me that I can sell back to the public. This is tough, as I need to think of a product people want that is sensible and reasonable to make. As for myself, I want this company to have almost eradicated vaping by 2024, potentially expanding into a different country that has similar vaping problems In their population.