Is there a market for an App for Senior Citizens so participants can meet and read daily news from specific newspapers?

Clarifying the scope of the project: Is there a market to create an app for Senior Citizens to they can meet and read daily news? 

Clarifying questions - Would you like me to estimate the number of senior citizens that would use the app? I would assume yes. Would you like me to design the app? I would assume yes. The prompt indicates that we're building an app, I would assume this would either be a tablet or mobile app. 

FIrst let's think about the goal of the app. The goal of the app would be to provide a way to connect with people from your community to meet up and read the news. Knowing that there's many social media platforms available, there is one gap that this app will help solve. Gap = connecting with people in your community. I'm assuming Senior Citizens don't want to be travelling far to meet up with other individuals. One of the goals would be to locate individuals and suggest meeting spots. Going back to my point about other social media platforms, I mentioned this to touch on the fact that this app will not have the majority of market share. We'll have to focus on user adoption. 

The user segement I am targetting are senior citizens. The goal of the launch is create awareness of the app and track customer adoption. The metrics that will be tracked are: user sign-ups, # of meet ups attended, retention within the app, enagagement (connecting with other people in your community), # of messages sent between individuals. 

Three-Phase implementation plan would include 

Pre-Launch

1) Identify the market size of whos likely to sign up for the app. Let's scope the release to Senior Citizens of Seattle. I'm more familiar with Seattle as I live here. There's about an 800k population in Seattle. Out of the total population (800k) I'm going to assume that at a min theres about 10% of senior folks in the area. The upper bound I would guess is 15%. The reasoning behind my estimate is because I know from experience, people like to retire in warmer climates such as Florida. So out of 800k X 10% there's 80K senior citizens who might sign up for the app. Knowing that other social media platforms are popular I believe out of the 80K the user adoption rate will be closer to 10% which gives us 80K X 10% = 8K. 

2) Partner with retirement homes/hospitals/community centres/schools/libraries - in order to raise awareness of the app, I'll look to partner up with various places in the community to spread the word of the app. The way I'll market the app is to indicate to the users the value prop and emphathize with the audience group. As a senior citizen, it may be hard making friends or finding people in your community that may relate to you. If I partner up with community centres, it may be easier to have users sign up and if they regularily attend the community center, that might be a place where they can meet. The metrics we'll track would be to find where the most sign-ups happen; which partnership is the most profitable. 

3) Another idea pre-launch is to partner with different news companies or other services. For example, if a user signs up they will recieve a free month of The New York Times subscription. Having a set of incentives would be helpful. Another example is if a user refers someone else, they will recieve a free credit towards an Uber ride to a meeting place. 

During Launch 

1) I'd track the number of sign-ups compared to my addressable market. I'd want to break down the user sign-ups based on their geo location to understand where the most sign ups are. If there's an area where very few sign-ups are happening, I would run a community event (such as setting up a booth in a community center or library) to socialize the new app. This is because, without having more than 1 user in an area participating there isn't much value of the app. The goal of the app is to build a community that wants to meet up and read the news together

2) Collect early feedback on the app. Are there any missing features? I'm going to assume the first set of features was established when building out the MVP. For example, being able to sign up and create your profile. Express your interests in news. For example: indicating whether you like reading about politics, current events or natural disasters. 

3) Survey what news platforms users are interested in using. For example, if the first set of news platforms aren't sufficient, understanding how we could partner up with new platforms would be helpful. For example, Apple News or other platforms in different languages. 

4) Offering travel credits to new users who are signing up in order to make it easy to go to their first news meet up. Track whether this incentizies users to join and go to their first meet up 

5) Offer snacks/beverages at meet ups 

Post Launch 

1) Measure the success of the promotions. For example, if we were offering Uber credits - how many of those were used? If there was free month of New York Times subscriptions, how many of those promo codes were used to sign up for a membership. 

2) Collect early feedback from participants. Send out a survey or attend a meet up and gather customer feedback. 

3) Find gaps in the product. Are there any features asks we need to take back to the product team? 

To Summarize 

The app we're launching is for senior citizens to find others in their community to meet up with and read the news. We'll launch this in Seattle first to see what the user adoption will be. We know that about 8k of senior citizens are likely to sign up for the app. We'll partner with various places in the community (libraries, community centres, hospitals) to raise awareness of the product. When users are signing up we'll incentivize them by offering promotions such as an Uber credit to your first meet up and/or a NYT free one month subscription. We'll understand how users feel about the app and identify gaps in the product before rolling out the feature further to different markets.