DroneTrade

The first ever peer to peer drone rental marketplace mobile app.

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Inspiration

Innovative. A first. The potential to create lasting impact on countless people across the globe, encourage creativity, trust and other inherently positive characteristics. The potential to generate income for countless people and even for the company I would build around it. But most importantly, a challenge.

These were all aspects I wanted in the app I chose to make during the summer academy. Make School's Product College and other revolutionary education/business models such as those by Uber, Airbnb and Turo also played a key role in inspiring me.

What it does

The Gap: 3 million drones will be shipped in 2017. The drone industry is worth $3.3 billion today, projected to grow to $13 billion by 2020 and $90 billion by 2025 according to IBISWorld. However there is still a huge amount of people who do not buy them because of the price or because they know they will only need it a few times a year. These people and organizations want one when they go on vacation or for an event, essentially for a short amount of time.

Our Solution: We satisfy this unmet market by allowing drone owners to post local listings for their drones and set their own daily rates. Anyone who needs a drone may then search available listings in their area and rent one for their short term needs. People who couldn't afford the experience of a drone now can. People who want to test ones out before investing in one, now can. People who own drones and don't use them 90% of the year, can now earn extra income.

Key Solutions To General Concerns:

  1. The renters exact address is not revealed until they approve the rentee's request.
  2. All payments flow through the app.
  3. All users are verified through a phone number and connected bank account or credit/debit card.
  4. Renter only gets paid after we get real time confirmation from both parties that the transaction successfully occurred.
  5. Other obvious concerns have been accounted for accordingly.

Challenges I ran into

Designing and implementing a smooth payment flow took countless hours, so many that all of the intricate complexities and edge cases which needed to be accounted for cannot be summarized. The general complexities came down to integrating iOS frontend code with the Stripe API, one that requires your backend to communicate with theirs. This forced me to integrate Firebase's Cloud Functions, a brand new feature still in Beta Testing, with the Stripe API and iOS frontend code. This required me to write a large amount of code in node.js, a language I had no experience in and so was forced to learn as well. To the best of my knowledge, there is no public GitHub or tutorial that explains or shows an integration between all three of these, potentially making my app the first with this integration.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  1. Forming Drone Trade, LLC a company to own and manage the DroneTrade app as well as take its profits as income.
  2. Earning a job as a Project Manager at AppsGlobal (appsglobal.com), a La Jolla based software development company, due to the speed at which I completed this complex project.
  3. Learning node.js in the process.
  4. Devoting my all into this project during the summer academy, meaning putting in an average of 12 - 14 hours a day (Monday - Friday). Devotion shown by how, after the 2nd week, I would sleep at the summer academy location Mon - Fri, or in my car, to avoid my time-wasting 1-2 hour commute home and put more time into learning/programing as well as the business/marketing side of this project.

What's next for DroneTrade

Facebook Conference: Facebook will be flying me out to San Jose, and providing accommodations, so that I may attend their invite-only The @Scale Conference on August 31st, where I will learn about scaling apps/systems to millions or billions of users. This is in addition to being able to collaborate with 5-6 hundred software engineers from Big-Name tech companies who spend their careers working on scaling apps/systems to millions or billions of users. My goal is to network and gain 1-5 mentors or unofficial advisors for the DroneTrade application.

Marketing Strategy: Our marketing strategy consists of contacting popular youtubers/instagramers who post travel/drone related content, and signing contracts with them to advertise us in the coming months, in exchange their viewers may sign up with their unique referral code, and the advertiser will earn a __% of our profit on every transaction of every user who used their code, until a cap of $50,000 is reached. We are also in contact with groups apart of the Drone User Group Network.

Marketing Status: We have confirmed around 417,000 subscribers/followers which will be reached in the coming months through many youtubers/instagramers doing the above agreement. We have also confirmed a total of 12.9 million subscribers/followers who can be reached in the coming months by youtubers/instagramers who love the idea but will need an upfront fee. The amount of money required to pay all of these confirmed fees is just under $55,000.

Drone Trade, LLC: Drone Trade, LLC has filed to be treated as an S-Corp by the IRS, and will be accepting profits from DroneTrade as income.

Moving Forward: Once we confirm over 500,000 people that will be reached in the coming months, we plan to release the app publicly. We then hope to focus on specific areas of the country showing more interest. During this time I plan to submit quality updates regularly, as well as attempt to raise enough money to cover fees for Part II of our marketing plan, which is to then advertise to that 12.9 million potential users. I also plan to release an android version of the app before Part II, possibly through partnering with AppsGlobal. Even though the summer academy has come to an end I have not reduced the time I spend daily on this business and application.

School: I plan to start my second year at UCR in September 2017, and continue pursuing an electrical engineering degree.

For More Info Visit: thedronetrade.com

Contact Via Email: [email protected]

All statements can be verified upon request for Make School Competition purposes

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