Kyle
Lot’s of people came out Sunday night to the final pitch event for LaunchMemphis, SeedHathery and LaunchYourCity’s 48 hour launch event. Graduates of SeedHatchery’s two previous classes were in attendance all weekend long to mentor and support their fellow startups. Also, previous participants in the last 5 48 Hour Launch events were in attendance as well.
Hometown startup hero Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily was absent from the event, despite the fact that she vowed to cover startups everywhere in her inaugural post at the relatively new startup focused Silicon Valley website. Oh Well we’ve got a lot of coverage here from the great event.
HappyPotty was another one of the unique “finalists” selected to develop over the weekend long event.
Problem: Finding a clean bathroom on a road trip
Solution: HappyPotty hopes to be the mobile app of choice to find clean “Happy” bathrooms while traveling by car.
There are a couple of similar sites out there. The biggest one was developed in conjunction with toilet paper giant Charmin, however it has it’s flaws.
HappyPotty ran through some statistics including the fact that there are over half a million potty breaks during road travel per year. That number actually seems a little low.
The app is simple, go to a bathroom and rate it “Happy” or “Crappy” the interface shows two toilet flushers, one colored green, and the other red.
They hope to add more functionality like details on the bathroom from cleanliness, to changing tables, seat covers and more.
For monetization they are looking at traditional mobile app in app ads and geo-located advertising with couponing.
The biggest challenge with an app like this is they have to build enormous, nationwide scale fast. The other challenge is sourcing bathrooms. Surely there are a lot of location based api’s however none that will tell you whether they have a multi-person bathroom or a one person bathroom or if you’ll have to purchase something to even use the bathroom.
They Happy Potty team was able to track down some gas station and rest stop data to start the build out of the app, alongside FourSquare API’s. Check out the pitch video below:
Linkage
Check out Happy Potty here at happypottyapp.com
Here’s more of our 48 Hour Launch coverage
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