Given the problem of finding a location for a business, what do you instinctively do? You look for locations where related businesses are already located.
Bullseye Brick and Mortar (BBM) is a website that helps you find the best location for your business. All you need to do is describe the target demographics of your users or the businesses that you are similar to.
Let’s say that you want to add a location to your high-end tea shop. You probably want to be in an area that has a lot of foot traffic, because you aren’t a go-to store and still kind of new. You also want to be within a few blocks of other high-end commercial shops, so that people who are willing to pay a premium for your tea will walk by.
You feed that information into BBM and it’ll search its index for locations that are highly commercial (lots of shops per block) and also have mostly high-end stores. In the greater peninsula area, it would probably suggest Stanford Mall and a few downtowns like Palo Alto, Burlingame, and Menlo Park. It would probably also find some hidden gems, strip malls with a critical mass of high end stores.
One feature that BBM could have is a search for related businesses. If you are trying to compete with Apple and want similar locations as Apple Stores but not spots that they have already claimed, BBM could figure out what the most common characteristics of locations that have Apple Stores are and return similar results.
More advanced features would involve looking at social media data about where people who you want to target are shopping and hanging out. For example, social media data could help you determine foot traffic. If there are several chain stores in a particular region and people frequently post about all but one of them on social media, it may mean that the area that one is in gets significantly less foot traffic. Also, social media data could help determine popularity of an area by ratings of nearby businesses. It’s better to be within a few blocks of restaurants with 4.5+ stars on Yelp then surrounded by 2.5-starred restaurants.
So this basically does market research for you? What about the local chamber of commerce, and zoning boards, don't they have a say in how all of this happens? Will this site also take into account my budget as a potential shop owner? Is it synced with current real estate listings of buildings for lease? or does it just give me the area I likely want?
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