THE BIG IDEA

One of the things that makes us excited to come to work every day is when we meet an entrepreneur with a big vision for creating a positive disruption in the world. One such visionary came to us with years of success in the alcohol business with the idea of an app that would give free rides to people who enjoy going out to drink.

What drove him was the vision to make community streets safer for our families. What he didn’t have was how this business would make and be a profitable business. The first thing we did was develop a solid strategy for the business. Then we had to bring this baby to life with communication. A brand was born!

WHAT WE DID

With a strategy and a brand in hand, we went to work to bring the app idea to life. We researched the app market for competition and discovered while there were only a couple of similar businesses, none of them came close to solving the issue of drunk driving. Or were quite honestly exciting. So, we challenged our team to dream up the perfect all-in-one going out with your friends and get home safe experience. With this in hand, we upped the idea of just giving away free rides. We gamified it so that the user had fun in addition to getting free rides. We developed several use cases for this perfect out-on-the-town experience that would encourage users to invite friends to join them in the fun. We even expanded the vision beyond alcohol to include the rapidly expanding notion of legalized cannabis. With this in hand, we went about designing an elegant UX design with our target user and her friends in mind.

Oh, while this was going on, we also developed the business model. Making our communities safe is one thing. This baby needed to become a sustainable business. It also needed investors, so of course we developed a pro forma, a pitch deck, and put together an executive team that could usher this disruptive community-supporting enterprise into the market with aplomb.

WHY IT WORKED

Once the development team was on its execution path of knitting these elements into a seamless user experience, we steered our attention to a) developing an email list of hungry, interested customers who wanted first dibs on this app, b) a prospect list of restaurants and bars who wanted to be known by these users, and c) highly targeted investors who were focused on the alcohol and cannabis sector. We then went to work on developing the market rollout which included an alpha, a beta, and a pilot test Today, ONUS has been endorsed by the Department of Transportation as part of their Safe Streets for All initiative and is currently working to launch in San Diego as part of the Safe Streets Initiative San Diego along with RADD (Recording Artists Against Drunk Driving).