Identifying Opportunities in Economic & Regulatory Trends

Economic

Homelessness - There is an opportunity, especially in Gainesville, to help the economic issue of homelessness in and around Alachua County. I discovered this opportunity by living in Gainesville and seeing a large number of homeless people walking around with their backpacks and also through some research on specific statistics and such.

As of 2018, there were 641 documented homeless people on the streets and shelters of Alachua County. Of these 641 homeless, 450 of them were living on the streets and 191 were living in shelters. It is absurd that way over half of the total homeless people in Alachua County are on the streets, unhelped by homeless shelters.

The cost of a single apartment in Gainesville is $800. This is a high cost for these people. If more apartments could follow the pricing of complexes such as Arbor House and Sunrise Apartments, who charge $400 a month, there would be more of an opportunity for these people to get up on their feet, but these places only have about 30 units available.

A prototypical customer is most definitely a person who is currently homeless and looking for housing. I think this opportunity is moderately difficult to accomplish as it takes a lot of effort from the community. I personally saw this opportunity because of how often I travel around Gainesville and seeing all these homeless people, each in their own completely unique situation, trying to get by, it just makes me want to help out.

Public Transportation - As a UF student I have seen an opportunity for a more affordable way of transporting yourself and others to and from the various bars in and around the UF campus. The current primary transportation is Uber or Lyft drivers. While this is a solution to drunk driving it is not a solution for my wallet. These drives cost about $8 a pop and that will soon add up when you consider going there and back and who knows where else.

While UF has a "later Gator" bus that runs late at night, this bus only runs through UF campus and not really where the bars are. I believe that an additional bus route that sweeps up and down Univesity Ave. would be very beneficial to the students of UF, the prototypical consumer for this opportunity.

I saw this opportunity because I am a college student who occasionally goes out and I know exactly how devastating it is to realize just how much money you've spent on Uber rides that night.

Regulatory Changes

Tobacco Law - Recently, Alachua County changed its tobacco policy to the age limit of 21+ instead of 18+. It is fairly assumable that the reason for this policy change was because of the recent trend in disposable nicotine vapes. Nationally, there has been a lot of concern for these vapes as their health effects are fairly unknown, but the companies distributing them are making so much money that they could care less.

The fact that Alachua County has actually passed a policy change like this gives hope to the opportunity of getting rid of nicotine vapes. If more effort could be put into advertisements around campus promoting anti-vape, spreading the message around, giving out statistics and unknown facts. It really is an epidemic, kids are getting their hands on these vapes at a younger and younger age and getting addicted to nicotine.

I think this opportunity is fairly difficult to accomplish as college kids love their vapes, but with enough effort, I think it could be manageable to effectively decrease the number of people who vape. I saw this opportunity because I quit nicotine fairly recently due to the negative things I've been hearing in the news and I think its something more people need to do.

Spotify - While this may seem like a strange opportunity I believe that Spotify is wasting a huge opportunity of making their music platform more social and interactive. Currently, Spotify is leading Apple Music with 100 million streamers worldwide compared to Apple Music's 60 million.

While Spotify already has the social aspect of finding friends and being able to see what they are listening to, I believe that they should go the next step to making a feed of music that you've listened to and what your friends are listening to. Also, comments should be implemented so that you can complement your friend's music taste.

Music is such an important thing to so many people, I think that it should be way more common for people to share songs with one another, rather than having to creep on a person's profile. Lately, I feel like mainstream music has reached a point that if you put music on that isn't "mainstream" people will look at you weird and ask you to change it. No one should be shamed for not listening to RapCaviar 24/7. People should be proud of the music they listen to and I think that a culture of sharing music would greatly improve people's outlook on uncommon genres.

The prototypical customer for this opportunity is high school kids to young adults fresh out of college. Spotify is a fairly new app that mainly youth are using and I think that it would be younger people who would implement the improved sharing aspect of the app.