Freshman Jack Nichols will be representing Iowa State’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences during the Iowa State Innovation Pitch competition Tuesday night.

Nichols is one of the co-founders of a new marketing product named Spotlight, a mobile app that helps serve both businesses and consumers. The other co-founder of Spotlight is Jon Jansen a recent graduate of Iowa State who has collaborated with Nichols to help jump start the product.

Through the use of geo-tracking, Spotlight allows consumers to see which local businesses near them are having deals as well as have easy access to other basic information such as their menus, hours and addresses. The app also will allow consumers to see where their friends are by allowing consumers to “check in” to different businesses.

“Its an online marketing platform with the two interfaces of business and customers, where on the customer side using geo-tracking you can see local business’ and where their friends are, like where people are checked into,” Nichols said.

On the business side the product Spotlight allows businesses to send reminders or notifications about deals or sales going on in their store right to the phones of the people using the app and on top of that makes advertising to different specific demographics much easier.

“When you sign up for a user account you fill out basic information like age and sex, and so by using those businesses are able to when they create an ad, target specific demographics,” Nichols said.

Nichols is excited about the product’s progress so far and its feedback.

“I thought that entering it [in the pitch competition]would be a really good way to kick-start the project and test the validity of the product since the judges choose not based on just the actual pitch but on the idea of the product and if they think its viable,” Nichols said.

Nichols does not plan to change too much of his pitch before entering tomorrow’s final competition, just change some basic language and style. Nichols is looking forward to the next pitch and has high hopes for the product. 

“We think that where we are at is pretty good right now, probably will change up the pitch itself a little like add in more business statistics and competition phrasing,” Nichols said.

The group plans to launch a beta of the product sometime during this spring or summer where they hope to create and fine tune the actual app itself before its real launch. Spotlight plans on using local talent from Iowa State from ISU’s computer science Hackathon event to help create some of the software needed to successfully jump-start the app.