Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The pitch

You got into business to make a product or perform a service, not to spend countless hours trying to find a location for your next store. Let BBM use its intelligent algorithms to find the best spots to put your next store. Best of all, BBM is free.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The hard part

Without a doubt the hardest part is going to be getting the business location data. You would want to go to Google, Apple, Microsoft or whereever they get their data, and try to strike a deal.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The fun part

For me, the fun part would be extracting useful patterns from the commercial business and social media data. If you looked at the type of businesses that are usually around a sample of Peet’s coffee shops, how well could you predict their other locations? If you knew the patterns of social media geo tagged posts, how well could you infer foot traffic?

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The growth potential

This is somewhat hard to estimate, but I’ll do my best. San Francisco has around three hundred thousand businesses according to datasf. If there is a 10% turnover per year and half of the new businesses use BBM to find their spot and it takes 200 page views to do find a location, that would amount to three million page views per year. If the ad click probability was 2% per page view, there was an average of one ad per page view and the cost per click was twenty five dollars, that comes out to be 1.5 million dollars per year in revenue in San Francisco. I think that BBM could scale up another factor of 100 if it went nationwide.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The monetization

There are two ways to monetize BBM: ads or a free/subscription model. I think ads are a much better choice because making a watered down free version may not convince people that the site is really that great (and make them fork over money for the premium version).

Ads make perfect sense for the website because users on the site are already engaging in a commercial activity. The ads would be targeted for people looking to rent commercial real estate in the area (i.e. the users of the site). It would also be possible to employ a combination of both approaches, but I think ads should be the core of the monetization.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The idea

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.

Bullseye Brick and Mortar - The motivation

Brick and Mortar businesses aren’t going away. One of the first problems people run into when starting a ‘real’ business is finding a location for it. You can search for commercial real estate online, but it’s hard to get at it’s real value.