Why I Built inTouch and Why I’m Auctioning the Android App & Business Plan on Flippa

inTouch allows you to easily do just that. Stay in touch with those who matter most to you. Unfortunately, it might have been ahead of its time two years ago… That’s why I’m auctioning it on Flippa and it is going fast. Download it on Android.

inTouch noticed you haven’t talked to mom in awhile, so it sent your preset greeting to her by text to spark a conversation.

The Short Version of the Back Story

Why

I built inTouch during the summer following my sophomore year of college. At that time, I had just completed my university’s toughest required course taught by the one and only Doug Lea (the engineer behind concurrency in Java) and was heading to my first internship at IBM. I knew that tougher days were to follow for me academically and professionally and that would mean I would grow worse at staying in touch with friends, families, and mentors. Staying in touch had always been a weak point of mine, so as an engineer, I decided to solve the problem now that I had the necessary skills to at least start.

How

I spent every night and weekend working on inTouch. It was an extremely tough problem to solve because of all of the variables that go into communication and how people interact with one another. I was attempting to design a machine that could authentically represent a person who aspired to be loving and caring enough to stay in touch with loved ones but struggles to find the time to pick up the phone or craft an email. I included email because I thought of the many mentors I, an aspiring entrepreneur, had and how the internet gurus of networking kept telling me that it was important to send an email to each of them every two months or so. I wanted to cover all grounds of communication.

I figured out the problem with a good amount of math, sociology, philosophy, and Java engineering.

The Launch

By the end of the summer, I had completed inTouch and spent the next few months silently testing it with family and friends. I even tested it with some mentors. It worked perfectly. During the winter of 2015, I released it to the Play Store and let it sit there for anyone who might need it as badly as I did. The people who used it loved it. The problem was that I didn’t have the time and resources to really market it, and so it only achieved 10–50 downloads.

Why Am I Auctioning It?

I had attracted a prominent marketer who helped me write the business plan (part of the plan is included below). However, he soon fled for his own reasons. I didn’t have the time or energy to look for another partner as I was back in school with another tough workload from Doug Lea’s courses.

Either inTouch was ahead of its time or I was, but I project that, in the near future, it will either be the tool that everyone loves and uses or the tool that everyone needs but can’t access as it will not be available and ready for the masses. That is why I am selling it to the highest bidder at the end of the next 6 days.

Join the bidding:

inTouch - android app listed on Flippa_Buy & Sell Websites, Domains, and Apps on the Flippa marketplace._goo.gl

The Business Plan (As of 2015)

I had big dreams for this technology and still do. Unfortunately, I am not willing to commit the time to it at this stage of my life, so I want to equip whoever purchases it from me with my vision. If you are the buyer and you so choose to follow my vision, I will be more than happy to advise you further. While I want to inspire potential buyers and help them imagine where they can take inTouch, this technology can go so many ways, so it is up to the buyer to take it wherever he/she wishes.

What follows are parts of the business plan I drafted during the summer while I finished developing the application.

Problem

As times get hard and people find themselves working more to accomplish their many goals, it is easy to fall out of touch with the ones that matter most to them.

Solution

By use of sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms, inTouch solves this problem with minimal effort from the user.

inTouch learns who you talk to, when you talk to them, how often, why and in what context. This data allows inTouch to keep you connected to the ones who are most important to you when it’s incredibly easy to fall out of touch.

inTouch uses artificial intelligence to help you automatically stay in touch with those who matter most to you when you are too busy to pick up the phone or send a checkup email.

[Potential] Products

inTouch will be sold in the Google Play Store and App Store for free with purchases possible inside of the application. Users will be able to buy future exclusive features. Until we develop our enterprise solution, this will be our product.

Enterprise Software

Because inTouch is an artificial intelligence app that has a mission of learning how users communicate, we will advance our artificial intelligence algorithms to work for enterprises. The solution will enable large businesses to manage their communications with their customers in a more effortless manner. This solution will incorporate our current mobile, Short Message Service (SMS) and telephony, communication algorithms with email to provide a streamlined approach for business to client communication. Along with this solution, we will build internal tools for enterprises to use to manage internal communication.

Our enterprise tools will allow businesses to operate internally without concerns of communication between staff being lost as well as externally without worrying about falling out of touch with customers.

Content Curation Extension

Where inTouch gets even more useful is in content curation. Because inTouch will learn when, how, and why the user communicates with their contacts, as inTouch advances, it will be able to learn what the user and their contact are talking about and in what context. inTouch will learn what the user’s conversations are about so that when it is time to send a scheduled message, it can fetch relevant and recent content online to add to the message. This will make sure the user and his or her contact always have something to talk about and can pick up where they left off.

Networking Aware Tools

These tools will be built to know when a user has met someone new and be able to decipher where and when they met in order to make sure the user remembers to contact the person and provide them the necessary information to do so. Paired with our base algorithm and Content Curation Extension, these tools will help professionals more efficiently and effectively network with others.

Revenue Model

Enterprise Software

Most of our revenue will be generated from our enterprise software once developed. We will have three (3) enterprise products:

• Internal-use software
• External-use software
• Content curation extension

In-app Purchases

While a large number of our users will use the application for free, we expect to get a good amount of our revenue from in-app purchases, albeit our lowest form of revenue.

Competition

Although inTouch is currently in a field of its own, we have a few potential competitors. Companies like Hubspot and their Sidekick email software, and Boomerang email software are all potential competitors to inTouch. These companies and products have proven themselves in their markets and are close enough to inTouch’s market that they could compete if they developed similar products or advanced the functionality of their current offerings.

From these competitors, we will learn what works well for marketing an application like inTouch and what doesn’t. We will learn from their shortcomings in email software and learn from what they do well. We will also gain an understanding for pricing and sales strategies that work for applications like ours.

BroApp, which sends scheduled messages to a single person, will also be a competitor to inTouch. This application found success with the media because it marketed itself as the relationship “wingman”. However, they have not been able to iterate, so they have stalled to only 50,000 downloads in the Google Play Store and a poor rating due to limitations. We are taking note of their shortcomings in execution and their success in the media.

Other lesser known competitors to inTouch would be SMS scheduling applications. Applications in the top tier of this category have collectively acquired more than a million downloads in the last few years.

By maintaining its competitive advantages of artificial intelligence and usability paired with optimal user experience, inTouch will be able to compete and stay ahead of its competitors. As inTouch grows, we will add greater functionality that will even further separate us from our competitors.

While there are products like Claralabs.com and Bond on iOS that will remind you to complete tasks, inTouch is the only application that makes sure the user accomplishes their goal by assisting them in doing so.

There is currently no other artificial intelligence Android or iOS application geared towards keeping people in touch and encouraging better communication, so inTouch will be first to market.

Conclusion

If you know anyone who might be interested, they can join the bidding which is at $100+ after only a few hours as of the time of drafting of this article:

inTouch - android app listed on Flippa_Buy & Sell Websites, Domains, and Apps on the Flippa marketplace._goo.gl