MyPhoneVouchers.com has been a personal journey for me and started out with my local Gymnastics Club.  As with most not-for-profit groups our club is always balancing the fees that are charged for the services to it’s member and expenditure to make improve the facilities.  Generally to improve facilities we fundraise via a variety of activities.  We also fundraise to assist our gymnasts travel to competitions.

One of the most immediate fundraising activities the club under takes from time to time is the “Sausage Sizzle” in front of the local hardware chain.  Generally the activity is done by a few dedicated members which I hope to think I’m one.

During one such event two summers ago it was particularly hot 41 degree day and we had cooked 700 odd sausages in the morning.  While dripping in sweat and cursing the existence of bread roles, onions and meat bags it thought “there must be a better way!”.

This lead to a number of hair-brained schemes and plans but the plan had to have a few criteria:-

• Should return good effort to reward for the groups
• The product/service should be good value to the groups supporters (Fundraising targets)
• We need to be able to build relationships between businesses the groups, the groups members and the groups supporters

Basically we wanted to create a WIN-WIN-WIN relationship

Looking around a number of Daily Deal organisations had started to appear and in my opinion caused businesses to offer deals that were unsustainable.  What we needed was a discount system that we could sell to the groups supporters for fundraising and provide advertising opportunities to the businesses.  Originally this was going only to support my Gymnastics Club and I was going to target local businesses.

We thought about a website where the supporters could print out discount vouchers.  This was un-attractive for lots of reasons.

About the same time I got an offer to upgrade my phone and the new plan from the telco included internet data as part of the base plan.  Being a IT nerd I already have a data plan but this was the moment where I decided that a mobile application was the way to go….if everyone was getting a small data plan for free we should be able to use a small portion of that to deliver the solution.

That day I purchased an IPad, a Macbook  and signed up to the the Apple Development program…the journey began.

More to come.