24A: Venture Capital No. 1

Opportunity:

In the Electronic Dance Music scene, there is a problem where attendees of music festivals do not know what kinds of drugs that they are ingesting. Besides the fact that some people actually ingest the drugs that they know they are ingesting, for example, MDMA is a common drug that people like to use during festivals, and is the drug of choice for a lot of people. The problem with this is oftentimes, MDMA is mixed with other drugs such as methamphetamine as a way of cutting the drugs to profit the dealer more that can pose harm to users.

I think the window of opportunity for this need is constantly open as long as there is no competitor and as long as the drug scene is ongoing. I don’t think the drug scene is going to disappear anytime soon, so the window of opportunity is probably very large. The market is geared towards those who are in their early 20’s around the United States.

Innovation:

I want to innovate by creating a service that could test these types of drugs at music festivals without any repercussions. The service would have booths throughout the festival with drug test kits tested by professionally trained testers. Drugs that contain pure MDMA, LSD, etc. would be given back to attendees, but drugs who pose a large risk that festival goers should not take under any circumstance will just be destroyed.

The potential customers would be festival attendees and the nature of the need is that everyone who ingests drugs put themselves at risk. This service will just reduce that risk.

How this work and how I would profit would be to form a contract with music festival organizers, and would just charge the organizers on each person that tests their drugs. There could be a system that scan the bands of each attendee who tests the drugs and each scan can charge say around $10 for each person who tests the drugs. The cost of the service could be included in the cost of the admissions ticket for the festival. There could be a lot of marketing on the website of the festival and signs throughout the festival to encourage people to use the service.



Venture Concept:

This venture concept will solve the opportunity that I identified because it is a way to keep people safe from the drugs that do cause a lot of harm to attendees. I don’t think there is any switching into this service because there just aren’t any competitors in the North American market with this new product, so that is something that is not to worry about. There would be some logistical concepts such as traveling with each festival. For example, Insomniac organizes music festivals throughout the entire United States, so my service will have to travel throughout to catch every festival, and the drug test kits will have to be shipped throughout the United States, but I don’t believe that that is very hard to do. The amount of employees would not be very large, so my variable costs in terms of wages will be pretty low.



Three minor elements:

My most important resource will be that I have connections in the music industry that could get me in touch with music festival organizers. I think this is the most important aspect of my social capital because without getting in touch with these organizers to pitch my idea, my service will never be able to take off. I also have great interpersonal skills that can allow me to pitch ideas to executives successfully.

The next opportunity that I want to tackle with my current innovation is a way to separate the bad parts of a drug from the parts that is desirable. For example, if there is a way to separate the compounds of methamphetamine from MDMA, then I would capitalize on that opportunity.

Assuming this would launch, I would just watch this venture come to fruition and grow it from Insomniac, a music festival organizer, to other large festival organizers. I would travel the world to see my idea come to fruition and see the lives I have saved for this service.