Bonfire - Live Video Challenge Platform

PROBLEM Restaurants are amongst the most impacted brick and mortar business verticals by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vesuvio, a beloved neighbourhood pizzeria in Toronto, Canada that's been around for 63 YEARS, has permanently closed due to mandatory business lockdowns. Each and every day restaurants are closing their doors and laying off millions of people, while restaurant operators are losing significant revenue for the foreseeable future. In just one month, 800K Food Service jobs have been lost and 10% of restaurants have been permanently closed. Canada's $93 billion foodservice industry represents 4 per cent of the country's GDP. If conditions do not improve, Restaurants Canada estimates that foodservice sales will be down nearly $20 billion for the second quarter of 2020.

These changes in their business have highlighted that restaurants have struggled to adopt with digital solutions to support their businesses and brands, despite the massive rise in food ordering applications. There's a huge opportunity here to help push a traditionally brick and mortar food industry into the digital age

OPPORTUNITY There is an opportunity for us to take advantage of 3 key trends: 1) At home cooking is on an exponential rise; 2) Virtual gatherings and activities are becoming the new norm; and 3) People are looking support their local businesses That's where Bonfire was born.

WHAT IS BONFIRE: Bonfire is the go-to digital platform for live, interactive virtual challenges. Restaurants can host live events to make immediate revenue without any upfront costs. Bonfire helps restaurants monetize their idle skills, while promoting their brands, building community, and creating unique experiences for paying users.
Users can challenge their friends and family to participate in these live interactive events and share their progress and experience social media. Bonfire enables these users, who may otherwise have been patrons, to support their favourite restaurants in this time of need. We've provided a walk through demonstration below.

BUSINESS MODEL: "Pay as you Earn"

Bonfire utilizes a revenue sharing model, where we host content on our platform Users signed up with our platform can purchase classes. Revenue from each class will go to the restaurant with a % taken by Bonfire.

Free to Get Started: For participating restaurants, Bonfire will host the content for free and enable businesses to run live interactive video challenges & classes.

We do the Heavy Lifting: We will take a 3% transaction fee for all event ticket sales plus a one time $10 hosting fee per event.

Premium Features: For low monthly subscription fee ($25/month) for business, access in-depth analytics, higher definition streaming, lower transaction fees, featured content, and more benefits.

Our Progress to Date Within this hackathon, window, our team has managed to:

Conduct market research to better understand what our users seek from Bonfire
Developed a functional prototype that is ready for pilot testing
Developed designs for our user interface

We've even launched a small pilot with friends and family, building out a makeshift version of the user experience with low/no code tools to demonstrate the value proposition: We used a Zoom Link Hosting tool to create a basic landing page: ZmURL Public Link: https://zmurl.com/bonfire ZmURL Admin Link: https://zmurl.com/manage/aocxhjl3r4

The session was hosted on Zoom with a group. We created a makeshift image submission tool for voting: Submit Images Form: https://forms.gle/KWrYTG6dT5sTUw217

Images submitted can be viewed here: Folder of Image Submissions: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxqB_WTdo7oXfjNMOEdhdjQ2WHc4MlJYcXBHMk1WcjdNSGNjQWlZS0ZGdWQyQnhxdGF2Z1E?usp=sharing

Given our team's expertise and accomplishments during this time frame, imagine what we could over the next few months.

Our Team is Deep: Our diverse and well-rounded team brings advanced skill-sets in technical software development, machine learning, innovative design and business expertise

Natan Simchovich Captain MD Candidate @ UofT, PM at imaware - first company in US facilitating at-home COVID testing. https://www.linkedin.com/in/natan-simchovich/

Samuel Wu Product/Growth/Business Wizard Founding Head of Product @ LockeBio, VC @ Caravan Ventures. https://www.linkedin.com/in/shangmou

Kory Fong Developer Aficionado Security Software Engineer; MSc @ Princeton, Ex-Google https://github.com/bonfirehackathon/mvp

Keira Lum Foodie Strategist MBA @ Dalhousie University; Health Research, Clinical Improvements, Tech. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keira-lum-279b0377

Our Vision Our vision is become a primary outlet for virtual challenge experiences that enables businesses to earn and users to learn.

Join us around the Bonfire!