So the final of the 2015 apprentice lineup was between Joseph Valente and Vana Koutsomitis.
Joseph’s business plan surrounded expanding his plumbing business by pitching an idea to become preferred suppliers to property agents to areas outside of his current region
Vana’s business plan was to launch a dating app that combined online dating with game playing. The games would be a form of psychrometric analysis.
Industry experts and Lord Sugar quickly picked up the fact that Vana’s business would require more than the £250,000 investment to get to market. Vana had spoken to an app developer who suggested a basic app with few features would cost £30000 to £40000 to develop and for a more fully featured app would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and would need marketing.
Lord Sugar chose Joseph Valente as his business partner.
In his final summing up Lord Sugar did say he knew technology rather than the service industry, but the required investment for Vana’s idea seemed to be the downfall of her idea. Questioning her further she admitted the £250000 would be used as seed funding to get an app developed and to market and hopefully withing 6 months they would have 100000 users, She admitted she would have to get further funding to succeed but believed she could sell her idea to get extra funding from Venture Capitalists.
Unless Lord Sugar was willing to put in more money this would water down his shareholding so probably was not an attractive proposition. One industry expert implied there were about 15 dating apps coming to market per month.
It does make you wonder how people with ideas can become successful in the internet/app world. The average person could not easily provide the funds that are being suggested. Most successful apps are free and people seem to expect them to be free. In app purchases seem to work but there has been numerous negative reports of how easy it is for people to run up very large bills to use the app or if a game (progress further). This is especially true of apps aimed at Children.
Up until recently adverts were fairly non existant on apps and users were using the app version more tha the browser version of sites. Today apps now do show adverts but numerous ad blockers exist to stop ads from being displayed though these apps are being outlawed by the app stores; even some websites have been coded so that they show a banner to users if they have ad blockers installed in the browser and wont let them use the site unless the blocker is disabled.
It seems that perhaps bedroom technologists will be lucky to succeed; though this is no different to what happened in the video games industry as todays video games have budgets that are in excess of hollywod feature films. The likes of manic miner and pacman just dont get developed today
It will be interesting to see if Vana does launch her app.