ripoki.com

Business Plan

2008 Spring
  
By
Cortland Klein
Faisal Gowani
Parise Saman
Aiko Tanaka

Table of Contents


Executive Summary

automated scheduling secretary for the rest of us
 
These days, we all have busy, complicated schedules. It can be very time consuming to schedule a meeting with another person, let alone a group of people. ripoki™ aims to solve this problem by providing a web-based meeting scheduler.
 
What the heck is a meeting scheduler?
 
ripoki™ is intended to integrate with your existing digital calendar, whether it’s a PDA, cell phone, or computer. You simply choose the people you want to meet with, and ripoki™ automatically schedules your meetings, even rescheduling them as needed. The newly scheduled meetings then automatically appear in each person's calendars.
 
While there are plenty of existing solutions on the market to schedule meetings, most are restricted to internal use within a company and none are smart enough to actually predict the schedules of people and automatically schedule and reschedule meetings accordingly. ripoki™ is different in that it serves an unmet need by professionals and students alike, all while doing so in a non-intrusive, time-saving, and really cool way.
 
ripoki™ can and will succeed because it will be the first solution to provide a completely automated scheduling service that nearly anyone can use. In addition to having high intellectual property value, its service can also be profitable in many ways. For example, by partnering with local restaurants and venues to provide suggestions and reservations for meeting places, significant commissions could be made. Also, corporate and campus solutions could be offered that integrate with an organization’s existing meeting and facility infrastructure. And hey, maybe even partnering with a dating site to offer its clients a scheduling resource. Or, maybe not.
 
Where is ripoki™ going? How is it going to get there?
 
I am currently in the process of developing an initial version of ripoki™. ripoki.com has been purchased and a provisional patent for my predictive scheduling algorithm will be filed as soon as funding is available. I am also actively seeking out business partners who share the same passion as I do about helping people spend less time at a computer and more time with others. What is needed now is support and investment in developing a business around this idea that will guarantee profitability and, perhaps, help people spend less time scheduling and more time actually meeting.
 
For more information, contact Cortland Klein at (408) 506-9791 or c@ripoki.com.

Management Team


This business plan was created by the Founder as well as Faisal Gowani, Aiko Tanaka, and Parise Saman, as part of a group project in a San José State University College of Business class. Each will receive nominal shares of the company for their contributions to the business plan.

Missing Key Employees

Co-Founder

Company and Industry Background

The idea for ripoki can be traced back to a former idea that Cortland Klein published on his website on 2005 December 6, among other times.1 In it Klein proposes software that could automatically schedule people's lives (in this case, students' class schedules).


In the Fall of 2006, Klein became president of a business fraternity pledge class. During this time, Klein was responsible for scheduling dates and times for a group of 12 individuals to all meet in the same place at the same time. Because all the individuals were students and most worked part time as well, finding open times proved time consuming to Klein. It is during this time that Klein conceives of ripoki.com as a marketable business opportunity and begins designing and prototyping various algorithms in the field of non-linear programming to discover solutions to the multi-variable and graph-based problems commonly encountered in multi-user scheduling and rescheduling.


In the Spring of 2008, Klein continued negotiations with a close friend and former classmate from De Anza who Klein believes may become the co-founder of ripoki.com. Until negotiations are completed, however, it is unsure if this will become the case.


1: http://pixelcort.com/159


Design and Development

Klein and a potential co-founder are currently developing a prototype of the web-based service. They expect this prototype development to ramp up in the 2008 Fall after they graduate from college and have more time to devote to the project. While a working prototype is not functional at this point, they expect to be able to create a functional prototype by 2009 January.

ripoki.com has been purchased by Klein and will be transferred to the company once it is incorporated. All IP related to ripoki will also be transferred to the company upon incorporation.

The algorithm designed for ripoki is patentable, and part of it is planned to be patented, leaving the other part as a trade secret to maintain maximum competitive advantage.

One significant trend and basis for this business model is that Web-based startup companies are going virtual in the sense that they no longer need to buy tangible depreciable assets such as servers. Instead, ripoki will rent all tangible assets. The cost of renting servers versus buying them is reaching an inflexion point where it is more cost effective to rent them than buy and maintain them. This also simplifies the business overhead of managing servers, enabling the co-founders to focus on developing their service rather than their administrative overhead.

Critical Risks

Competition

Possible competitors will be Google's Calendar, Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange products, Apple's iCal and Calendar Server products, and MeetingMaker's products. However, these programs only schedule one meeting at a time; none of these programs currently have the capabilities of automatically scheduling and rescheduling events to best fit the schedules of all users involved like ripoki.com. It is possible through costly processes for competitors to improve their existing programs or create new ones to match ripoki.com's effectiveness and functionality.

Financing Plan

Initially, our business will be bootstrapped by getting a prototype written by our founders with stock options and no actual expenses. Once a prototype is achieved, initial Angel Investing will be sought to finance the first 6 months of the beta program. From there, VC funding will be sought to permit for continued R&D and expansion.

Goals

Eventually ripoki.com's web service will reach all kinds of groups and individuals, from students to executives. Our long term goals are to market the service to a variety of clientele. Our goal is to reach students in universities and colleges in the United States. We are aiming to reach 50-100,000 families in the first 2 years. We want to target around 1,000 small businesses in 2-4 years and 1-10 large enterprises in the first two years. The goal of this service is to make the work and personal environments better places by minimizing time spent doing administrative work and enabling users to have less stressful lifestyles in and outside of work.


Marketing and Industry Analysis

ripoki.com is a revolutionary new time management service that will be the only on the market able to automatically reschedule events as needed. For our Market and Industry analysis, we are going to focus on our End-User Market primarily while also commenting on our Advertiser and Enterprise programs.


Customer Segmentation

For our end user customers, we can segment individuals into four user types. We've grouped our survey results into these four User Types as well.

User Type (Grouped in Survey)
 Service Usage
0
 'The Non-User'- Would not use at all, very uncomfortable with the idea.
1
 'The Outside User'- These users do not necessarily have  with ripoki.com but they are involved with people who do use it regularly or partially.  These people are invited to schedule a meeting by others who use the service and can create an account when they are invited.
2
 'The Partial User'- These users use ripoki.com only for multi-party meetings or events but does not use it to schedule personal tasks. They are comfortable scheduling their own lives outside of work but want to have a resource for when they want to plan group events. Would use partially for specific types of scheduling (i.e. just work and events)
3
 The Complete User'- These users use our service for everything from personal errands, social activities, and work meetings because they are very busy. They are comfortable having ripoki.com manage their personal time because they need the service in order to have time for themselves to do other tasks because they are frequently on the road, attending many events and are extremely busy in general.

Identification

The problem with keeping track of personal and work schedules is that it takes away a lot of time from doing other things. It can be tedious and frustrating for those who are very busy people. Identification is achieved either by the need for scheduling assistance or the social network outreach our initial members have. Our initial members consist of our founders and initial interested parties.

When current users invite non users to an event, those invited become outside users and are made aware of our service. It is by means of necessity that they are introduced to ripoki.com, as the invitee uses our service to initiate the event invite. The customer will decide to use our service if they feel that there is not enough time for them to schedule events by themselves and keep track of all of them. If they are comfortable with our service taking care of their scheduling needs, it is likely that they will enroll in our service and become a Partial User. After they use the service for a while, they may find that they either like it or dislike it depending on how well we are taking care of their needs. In order to keep these customers, we will openly accept feedback and send out surveys to see what we can improve.

Buying Process

The buying process for a consumer is made in a series of steps.

  1. When a person is invited to an event, they become an Outside User. We explain to the person at this point that while our automated service will have access to their availability, no other users of our service will. While they may technically have an account at this point to represent their synced calendars, they may not necessarily come to the site themselves, only through emails to events they are invited to.
  2. At some point during the process of accepting an initiation to an existing event, we explain to the person that they too can use our service to create events, both to share with others and for personal scheduling. We also explain that our service is unique in that events can be flexible and rescheduled by the system unless undesired. The person may now start logging in to our site themselves and creating some events. This is known as a Partial User because these individuals probably will still rely on outside methods to arrange portions of their lives.
  3. We believe based on our survey that there will be some people who will ultimately use our service eventually to manage all of their events in their lives. These people are known as Complete Users.

We reach new customers through the services they already use. Google Calendar. Microsoft Outlook. Facebook. MySpace. These systems already have the infrastructure we build on top of.

We can also partner with Google, Microsoft, and our Competitors to offer our rescheduling system into their existing infrastructure directly. This means that their users can use our service branded and integrated directly through their existing service directly. Our partners would in turn pay us royalties and licensing fees to use our service directly as described.

We believe that users who have a need for our service will have in their social networks like-minded people. Therefore, their event invites to those they know will cause new users to become aware and likely use our service as well.

Survey Analysis

For our Survey Analysis, we've grouped our findings into Demographic, Geographic, and Psychographic groupings.

Demographic

We surveyed high school and college students, and professionals. Our original thought was for ripoki.com to have complete control over the schedules of those who subscribe to the service so it would minimize time spent by the user on their own schedules. We found that many people were concerned about their privacy and not having control over their scheduling. It was not clear in to our survey audience whether we would keep calendar information hidden from other members so we will need to clarify that. Because about 50% of the people were not comfortable with the idea that ripoki.com does all of the rescheduling, we came up with different levels of user interaction. There will be options where the user can limit the amount of control that ripoki.com has over their scheduling.


One thing that surprised us is that we found little correlation between our Psychographic results and our Demographic results. This means that in general, our market will be focused primarily on our Psychographic groupings.

Geographic

Our survey was conducted over the Internet for a one week period and reached an international audience. While there were a few results from outside Northern California, USA, the sample size outside this region was negligible. The map included shows visually where our samples live. Note that if two or more samples live in the same ZIP code region, only one pin is shown on the map.


From our geographic analysis, we know that our survey is clearly biased primarily to the South Bay area region. We believe that marketing primarily to people in this region is sound because the Internet makes it easy to simultaneously market on a global scale as well.

More research into international markets needs to be done here.

Psychographic

There are some psychological challenges that we will need to overcome in order to appeal to our market. While we can do our best to overcome these via educating our market, some of these are deeply rooted psychological perceptions that will require further research to overcome.


  1. The Digital Divide
  2. Privacy
  3. Control

Competition

For our competition, we have four primary classifications of competitors, sorted in terms of their risk factor, from greatest to least.


  1. Automated Reschedulers (None Currently)
  2. Personal Assistant Outsourcing (GetFriday et al.)
  3. Simple Meeting Schedulers (Meet-O-Matic et al.)
  4. Traditional Event Planners (Evite et al.)

Our competitive edge and how we are going to compete is our ability to reschedule meetings automatically. This means that if our users have multiple events scheduled using our service, scheduling new events can cause existing events scheduled with our service to be automatically rescheduled.

We can also compete differently by partnering with our competitors and offering our services through their existing infrastructures. They would want to do this because our service offers additional value than they are able to provide to their customers on their own. We would want to do this because it is easier to market to their customers than to develop our own customers alone.

Market Size and Trends

The U.S. economy is going into recession. While this will affect the global economy in some ways, it probably will not cause any major global recession, as the global economic welfare is moving to be less reliant on the U.S. economy. However, today the U.S. still has a strong control over the global economy, so we must be aware of this.


The following table represents our estimated revenue over 3 years. This assumes that our userbase will triple each and every quarter. If on average each user schedules two meetings per quarter with on average one other person per meeting, then each user will cause two new users to join. Advertising revenue is based on the assumption that each user will bring in on average $0.10 per quarter. Enterprise sales assume one enterprise contract is made every year for at $10,000 per quarter charge.


The market size for our service seems to be about half of those we surveyed. On a national level, that means that we can obtain up to around half of all college students and young professionals in the bay area alone, and with a national and international audience, the market is vast.


Quarter
 Users
 Advertising Revenue
 Enterprise Sales
1
 10
 $1
 $0
2
 30
 $3
 $0
3
 90
 $9
 $0
4
 270
 $27
 $10000
5
 810
 $81
 $10000
6
 2430
 $243
 $10000
7
 7290
 $729
 $10000
8
 21870
 $2187
 $20000
9
 65610
 $6561
 $20000
10
 196830
 $19683
 $20000
11
 590490
 $59049
 $20000
12
 1771470
 $17714
 $30000

 


There are three primary trends that will affect our forecasts:


  1. The average number of people per quarter existing users will be able to get to use the service. This is affected by both the number of events current users invite non users to as well as the probabilities new users will come back and use our service themselves.
  2. The average revenue per user advertising generates. Advertising revenue will vary based on the U.S. recession and spending trends of our users.
  3. The number of enterprise sales and the revenue gained from each.

Market Industry Trends

There are three key market trends we see that will positively impact the value of ripoki.com.

  1. The average increase of individuals' scheduling complexities will demand more intelligent scheduling tools than what are available today.
  2. People are becoming more comfortable and will demand electronically-facilitated workflows that will enable ripoki.com to capitalize on.
  3. The capabilities of low-cost computing hardware makes it tremendously easier to perform complex mathematical models that will enable ripoki.com to scale effectively with the combinational demands of the usergrowth.

Sustainability

We will stay sustainable by making sure we provide high-quality service to those who use our service regularly so we may spread through word of mouth. We will constantly gather feedback from current users to improve our services. In order for customers to gain confidence in our service, we will make sure there is corporate transparency to let customers know what we are working on to improve our service. Following trends is crucial to staying up to date with industry standards. More and more people will use cell phones and PDAs to manage their time. If the personal assistant service trend goes down, we will sustain our company by using the technology we have developed in other ways.


One way to sustain ourselves is to license our rescheduling tools to our competitors instead of marketing our service to end users ourselves. One trend we see is that over time, more individuals will have smartphones. These smartphones have internet access and have better calendar support. What was once only used by executives and sales persons is now being used by the mainstream consumers. These mobile tools will integrate with our service and offer mobile scheduling of events.


Another big trend is the growth of outsourced personal assistants. This surprised us when we did our competitor research. If these grow in popularity, we will have to differentiate ourselves by them by providing a better alternative to outsourced human services such as these.


Finally privacy and control will continue to be important issues in our market. We will need to constantly keep an eye out for the effects of our business decisions as to how they relate to the privacy of our customers' information and the control they have over our service.

Marketing Strategy and Philosophy

Much like other Web 2.0 services such as Facebook, Twitter[1], and particularly Gmail, we believe that if we create a good solid service that works and is valuable to our market, our existing members will naturally share our service with those in their social and professional networks to potential customers.

Due to the viral nature of our service creating new users by virtue of being invited to events being organized by existing users, we have a natural way to grow our userbase with little to no work on our own. Just like how a user has to have a Facebook account to be 'friends' with another Facebook user, here too users will have to have an account in order to have their schedules considered for events organized by ripoki.

Because what we are offering is a fundamentally novel service that acts as a value add-on to existing electronic calendar systems, we must focus our marketing strategies around users who already are using digital calendar systems.

Finally, because of new emerging online identity solutions such as OpenID[2] and email-based logins, the act of creating an account is transparent; creating as little burden upon a potential new user as possible.

[1]: "Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook." -Wikipedia
[2]: "OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site. OpenID is a decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide." -Wikipedia

Channels of Distribution

As a Web 2.0 startup, we are the manufacturer, broker, supplier, and retailer of our service. We control our entire channel of distribution. In addition, we have some retailing opportunities that we can capitalize on that will further increase our marketshare growth potential.

One of the core tenants of a Web 2.0 service is it's interoperability with other sites and services. As such, we will offer Public APIs[1] and offer Web Apps to integrate with other services:


[1]: An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of programming linkages that enable third party developers to integrate their products with our service. We can also leverage our own APIs to create additional tools that integrate with our service.

Strengths

ripoki.com will provide a service that a human assistant would traditionally provide and possibly more efficiently than an actual human being. The service requires minimum human interaction with the traditional calendar system and the user will spend less time scheduling and rescheduling activities. It is able to sync the calendars of those who subscribe to the system and recognizes relational connections between individuals to figure out the best possible meeting time and place. The system is able to reschedule events based on the lifestyle of the user, which is inputed by the user into the system at the beginning. It is able to calculate when the best time to reschedule things taking into account the human factor, such as eating, exercising, and sleeping. This is why it is more people-friendly than other scheduling systems.

Differentiation

What sets ripoki.com apart is that it will be the only service on the market to not just schedule events one at a time, but to optimally schedule and reschedule all events of all uses taking into consideration all possible combinations of them. By combining web, email, voice, and text, ripoki.com will help people thrive in their busy lifestyles, taking consideration of their social and physical well-being. For example, if ripoki.com noticed you need to reschedule a meeting with other people, it can move other events you or they have around to find the best fit schedule for all of the people involved. By default, it asks each individual before changing their schedule and explains the rationale of the change without compromising the privacy of others involved.

ripoki.com is also set apart from a health-conscious standpoint. By analyzing the stress and health considerations of events and the butterfly effects of the relationships between all events of all users, ripoki.com is able to discover ways to reschedule events to maximize the health and well-being of its users both for individuals and as a group of individuals.

Weaknesses

Currently there is a founder but no co-founder nor any working prototype. The founder does not have the time nor skills to develop a prototype himself in a reasonable amount of time; though he could create a prototype eventually, he believes that having a co-founder with technical knowledge is paramount to a successful venture.

The technical aspects of writing a system that can think like a human being when scheduling is a new concept and poses issues with development ambiguity in time delivery. Financially, it could double the prototype cost and time to prototype if technical difficulties are encountered.

Opportunities

The opportunities for a personal assistant service are high because of the way people's lifestyles are forming through social and technological changes. People in general are becoming busier, more stressed, and overwhelmed with the high demands of the workplace or family life. It also cuts costs in business and personal lives. It is able to integrate with existing calendar systems, which are becoming a norm for many people, and therefore follows technology user trends. 

Market Dynamics

There are six markets ripoki.com plans to take on.

First, there are an estimated 18 million U.S. college students today projected to grow to 20 million in 2013(1). As has been shown by sites such as MySpace and Facebook, with Facebook having around 18 million users in the U.S. and 43 million worldwide(2), that there is a strong demand by college students for online social networking and lifestyle services. Because college students tend to maintain busy lifestyles that include school, work, non-profit organizations, and friends and family, college students have little time to adequately manage their time to optimize their productivity and happiness. Their openness to ad-supported lifestyle services makes them a primary target for ripoki.com's service.

Second, there will be a projected 115 million households in the U.S. in 2010 comprising of 78 million family households and 59 married households(3). For both married and non-married households, parents and high school students need tools to arrange their lifestyles in sync with one another, which ripoki.com is able to do.

Third, there were around 21 million people aged 25 through 29 in 2006. With a majority of these people being newly graduated and entering the workplace for the first time, many of them will continue to want to maintain busy lifestyles as can be seen by the proliferation of social networking sites beyond the college level. These young professionals want to maintain a multi-purpose lifestyle that includes their professional and social circles.

Fourth, there were 5.9 million firms in the U.S. with 1-499 employees in 2004(4). These small firms with multiple employees need cost effective time management tools to coordinate their activities within their own firms, across multiple firms, and between their firms and their employee's outside activities.

Fifth, there were 17 thousand firms with 500 employees or more and 3500 enterprises with 2500 employees in the U.S. in 2004(4). These large firms and enterprises have strong I.T. needs for time management solutions for their employees. The challenge with these large firms and enterprises is that due to their size they often cannot easily tailor their schedules to the needs of their individual employees as well as the needs of the employees as a whole. Due to ripoki.com's scalable algorithm, ripoki.com is able to handle the interrelationships of all events of all its users, including interrelated users coming from a large firm or enterprise. Thus, enterprise licensing will be a significant stage 2 push for ripoki.com.

Sixth, due to the business model for students, young professionals, families, and some small firms, advertising and affilation programs will be required. Internet advertising over the last few years has been rapidly growing, increasing 21.4% from 2003 to 2004(5). With Google's stock price rising around 300% over the last three years(6) and that Google is in the business of Internet advertising as their primary revenue source, there is a strong automated Internet advertising opportunity that requires little investment and marketable returns.

However, because ripoki.com is designed to minimize the time spent on our site and instead focus on its lifestyle management services, ripoki.com must do more than mere advertising to garner revenue. Therefore it is important to secure partnerships and affiliations with other online social networking services, online dating sites, and event planning services. These partnerships offer our value added lifestyle management services to their users in exchange for royalties received by ripoki.com. Social networking sites accounted for 6.5 percent of internet traffic in February 2007 with MySpace and Facebook combined accounting for 91.06% of that(7).

Threats

Competition

Possible competitors will be Google's Calendar, Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange products, Apple's iCal and Calendar Server products, and MeetingMaker's products. However, these programs only schedule one meeting at a time; none of these programs currently have the capabilities of automatically scheduling and rescheduling events to best fit the schedules of all users involved like ripoki.com. It is possible though costly processes for competitors to improve their existing programs or create new ones to match ripoki.com's effectiveness and functionality.

Marketing Mix

In this section we discuss our product, pricing, placement, and promotion.

Product (Service)

Our primary service is to offer a time management solution to enable people to freely live their life with minimal worry over when and where they need to occur. With this comes an array of sub-services and specialized services to accommodate for our various customer bases. As with most Web 2.0 companies, our service will by default come with no warranty of any kind, nor any traditional mail, brick-and-mortar, nor telephone support. We may add telephone support as an option for some of our customers if it is determined needed.


For our end-consumer, in addition to our free, ad and partner supported service, we also offer a free support service site in the form of an online forum, feature request, and bug reporting service. This enables our users to collaboratively assist each other and we will have members of our team spend a portion of their time on the support service to help answer questions and solve problems other users are unable to assist with. Customers can optionally provide their telephone numbers so we can call them if we have any detailed questions about any problems they might be experiencing.

For our enterprise customers who want to offer room and object reservations within their organization as well as deep integration with their IT infrastructure, we will offer prioritized support on our support service site, as well as a telephone number that will reroute to one of our team members. Upon receiving a call from one of our enterprise customers, the team member will journal their support issues into our support service site.

We also offer a two-way partnership program for other companies who want to offer our services to their customers, offer their services to our customers, or both. We will have a special non-public partnership site for these companies' IT and Marketing teams to interact with our IT and Marketing teams collaboratively to come up with solutions to the needs of our partnerships. For example, if a regional restaurant wants to partner with us to offer a table reservation service to our customers arranging lunch or dinner events, our partnership service site will facilitate either the integration with their existing table reservation system, or build a new reservation system for them. Another example would be an online dating site that would like to offer safe, friend-approved, pseudonymous blind dates for their customers where the attendees would not normally know each other's personal contact information. We would need to offer a customized solution for this partner so that they can offer our services to their customers while maintaining their business and customer interrelation models. Finally, these partners' solutions can interrelate atop our platform, so in our example the attendees of a blind date can automatically have a lunch table reservation arranged for them, even though they don't know each other yet.

Finally, advertisers will have tools to provide location-aware advertising to our customers based on the locations of events our individual customers are participating in. Because current research indicates that a sizable portion of Internet using people may not be comfortable having automated systems target advertising at them, both educational material will be offered to customers as well as potentially options to opt-out of targeted advertising if needed.

Pricing

Our start-up company plans to earn approximately 80% of its revenue from 20% of its customers, and 20% of its revenue from 80% of its customers. 20% of our customers will be enterprise organizations and  partnerships with other services. The remaining 80% of our customers will be non-paying end customers which will be monetized primarily via targeted advertising on our service. Because the service is free for most users, the break even point is zero for them. Our profit margin is no applicable because our service is free.


Competition
 Pricing
Time to Meet
 Free basic, $3/3months, $5/6months
Tungle
 Free
Meeting Wizard
 Free
TasksEveryDay
 see below

Place

See Channel of Distribution.

Promotion 

We anticipate our primary promotion of our service will be through our existing users. A typical new user is obtained as follows:


  1. Bob, an existing user, wants to have lunch with Sue, a friend who has never used ripoki before. Bob invites sue to an event via ripoki and an email is sent to Sue.
  2. When Sue clicks the link in the email, a new account is created and linked to her email address, unless she indicates she already has an account and would like to link her new email address to it.
  3. Sue is given the chance to synchronize her existing electronic calendar(s) with ripoki. These sync connections are saved inside her new account.
  4. Sue then can specify her preferences as to when and where ripoki can schedule the lunch with Bob.
  5. Sue confirms the tentative time and place ripoki has set for their lunch.
  6. Sue is asked if she would like to add any additional events for ripoki to manage.
  7. If Sue adds additional events to ripoki, ripoki asks Sue if she would like to link her account to a login on another service so she can easily log back into her ripoki account without having to go back to her email from Bob.
  8. Sue is now a new user and may invite her friend Sally to a hiking trip.

Even if a user does not initially use ripoki actively themselves, after multiple invites by one or more friends using ripoki, it is intended that eventually they will be pleased by their experience and will at some point want to use the service themselves.

Initial users will consist of the founders of the company, their friends, family, and contacts. There will be approximately 20 to 60 initial users. On average, each user will invite 1-10 other users to events, and on average, at least 10% of these invitees will use the service actively themselves and invite at least 10 other people. The turnaround time between when a non-user is invited to an event is turned into a user who invites a new non-user to an event is estimated to be 1-4 weeks. We expect to double our user base every 1-3 months on average.

We will also spend time interacting with our current and potential users online via blogs, social networking sites, and at conferences and expos. At expos, we will have demonstrations by scenario of how our product can be used by different users. By being a relatively transparent company, when our public beta is released, it will encourage camaraderie and compassion by our current and potential users, and will enable high quality feedback from them. Furthermore, because the co-founder Cortland Klein maintains strong networking connections with many in the online tech journalism and blogging community, the company will have a competitive advantage in reaching out to influential online community individuals who, if interested in our company and its service, will broadcast our brand to their massive audiences.

For both short and long term promotion, we will use the inviter-to-invitee method, which is the most efficient way to market our service. In a way, it is a way to force someone to use the service by being invited by one who already uses the service. Other ways of promotion include online and paper-based advertising. For our service, we believe it will be most effective when the user is able to imagine oneself using the service, which makes it easier for them to see the benefits in it. It is important to communicate visually through images with supportive text to potential customers. This means that it is better to show a story-board about how they can use the service easily and effectively in contrast to verbally. We will advertise our service through related products such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar and other websites. We will use magazine advertising in popular technology, business, and general magazines such as Business Week, Fortune, and Time Magazine. In the beginning, we would only be able to afford to have a 1/8 or 1/4 page advertising space. We would have an in-house graphic designer to produce our promotional materials so we can cut costs on using other resources. We can make a video advertisement to put on websites such as youtube.com.


Media Type
 Cost Projection/Year
Online/web
 $10,000
Magazine
 $50,000
Video
 $300
Sales Persons
 $10,000
Other print/promo
 $300
Total
 70,600

Year
 Expected Returns
1
 $30,000
2
 $60,000
3
 $90,000
4
 $135,000
5
 $205,000

At conferences and expos, we will employ two to four sales people to demonstrate, communicate, and promote our service. The demonstrators will collaboratively show viewers how two or more people can easily schedule and reschedule meetings using ripoki and the benefits of using it. They will hand out promotional flyers, brochures, and take-away items as well.


Year  Budget
1
 $4,000
2
 $5,000

Budget includes all advertising media.


Thresholds

In this section, we will discuss how our marketing campaign will change to the various thresholds of our business. This assumes that thresholds are the stages in our market product life cycle.

Development

During the development stage, no market exists. There are no expenses other than R&D, which will be brought to zero by having the team work for stock options alone. At this time, angel investing is sought after to help purchase materials needed to continue development of prototype, such as servers and networking equipment. We will develop our marketing strategy in this phase.

Introduction

Upon public beta launch, our service will be foreign to nearly all who come into contact with it, as well as our brand name. At this point we will need to spend a lot of time focusing on doing interviews and attending Web 2.0 events and conferences to share both the idea of a time management service as well as the ripoki brand as being a trustworthy and invaluable tool for saving time and energy. During this time first round Venture Capital will be sought after to sustain living salaries for founders and employees so they can devote their full time to the company. Most of our promotional work will be through those that are of no cost or cost-effective such as online advertising, blogging, and word-of-mouth.

Growth

In the rapid growth stage of our service, it will be critical to maintain a public image in order to avoid detrimenting the growth wave of our users, or risk losing the massive influx of new users. This requires tremendous amount of listening in terms of technical support, feedback, and bug reports. We must also, from a technical standpoint, work tirelessly to ensure our service can handle the tremendous growth in server loads as well as edge cases that will arise as the user base diversifies. During this time we will probably seek additional VC funding to continue sustainable salaries for our founders and employees as well as server operating expenses to handle the rapid growth of our servers. We will do the majority of our online and paper-based promotion during this stage, since we would have a more stable budget to advertise more frequently and more publicly.

Maturity

As the growth of our user base begins to show signs of slowing, we must begin to establish ourselves as a partnering, integrating solution to acquire additional revenue and user growth. This is the time for diversification of our brand as well as our service feature set. We can begin to hire additional employees and form new teams to innovate new features and negotiate partnerships with other companies. Cash influxes now begin to come in the form of enterprise contracts and partnership agreements with payments coming into our company.

In this stage we also evaluate our exit strategies, if any are desirable, or prepare for going public.

Decline

In the unforeseen case that our service is undesirable, too early to market, our brand is tainted by unforeseen issues, or we are unable to diversify and partner with other companies ourselves, we have the option of selling our intellectual property to another company. The technological innovations required to bring this service to market alone will have high retail price amongst companies interested in purchasing our intellectual property. We will no longer advertise through paper-based ads and will continue to keep no-cost advertising online active.

"Selling out" may be a good thing if it best accomplishes our philosophical goal of helping people live their lives better. It may also prove to be of a high return value to our investors if a sufficient bid by a company is made.


Financial Analysis

Critical Assumptions

The numbers reflected on our financial statements assume that we acquire $10,000 from the San Jose State University Business Plan Competition of 2008 and $1,000,000 from angel investing and venture capitalists. Initially, our business will be bootstrapped by getting a prototype written by our founders with stock options and no actual expenses.  Each enterprise contract brings in 10k per month. We start with one enterprise contract, hence 10k.


The opportunities for a personal assistant service is high because of the way people's lifestyles are forming through social and technological changes. People in general are becoming more busy, stressed, and overwhelmed with the high demands of the workplace or family life. It also cuts costs in business and personal lives. It is able to integrate with existing calendar systems, which are becoming a norm for many people and therefore follows technology user trends. There are six markets ripoki.com plans to take on and this includes college students, households, professionals, firms, and enterprises.

Internet advertising over the last few years has been rapidly growing, increasing 21.4% from 2003 to 2004(5). There is a strong automated Internet advertising opportunity that requires little investment and marketable returns. However, because ripoki.com is designed to minimize the time spent on our site and instead focus on its lifestyle management services, ripoki.com must do more than mere advertising to garner revenue. Therefore it is important to secure partnerships and affiliations with other online social networking services, online dating sites, and event planning services. These partnerships offer our value added lifestyle management services to their users in exchange for royalties received by ripoki.com. Social networking sites accounted for 6.5 percent of Internet traffic in February 2007 with MySpace and Facebook combined accounting for 91.06% of that(7).


Sales and Growth Projections

For families, we are aiming to reach 50,000 in first 2 years. For small businesses we want to target around 1,000 in 2-4 years and 1-10 large enterprises in the second and third years.

Debt Assumptions

There will be a one time fee of $6,000 to get our technology patented, however this is not a debt per se.


Cost of Goods Sold

We will not incur any cost of goods sold since we will be renting all server equipment from another company. Our office space is a furnished rental. Laptops and cell phones are all owned by the employees themselves but are reimbursed for their expenses through their salaries, not through cost of goods sold.


It should be noted that in our employee contract agreements the employee is expected to use at least $500 per quarter for purchase and maintenance of a personal laptop and cell phone that the employee will use also for work related purposes.


Finally, our variable server costs, which grow with our user growth, are incurred not as Cost of Goods sold, but as operating costs.


Trade Discounts

This is not applicable to our business, since we are not buying products. The servers that we will rent are rented out at the same price that anyone else would purchase them for. Trade discounts are unusual in data server companies and we do not anticipate any companies to provide a discount for us.


Terms of Payments

Revenue is cash based, not accrual based. This is done through advertising revenues and enterprise revenues which are received immediately from corporations.


Salary Increases

In the first year of our service, we will have the founder and co-founder of the firm working as 1099 contractors of the firm. The initial salary will be $4,500 per month for the first three years. Starting the winter quarter of 2010 we will hire two employees, four more people in 2010 summer, four in 2011 spring at a rate starting at $6,000 per month. We expect the United States inflation rate to increase steadily so we will combat that by increasing our salaries for year two and three. We will not have amortization or depreciation costs because of this.


Seasonal Characteristics of Business

Generally,we do not anticipate any seasonal variations in our growth. Individuals and businesses will always have scheduling conflicts regardless of what time of the year it is. The exception would be the holiday season. Generally, individuals and businesses are busier during this time of year due to the hectic season. Particularly, businesses will have a greater need for our service since there are year-end meetings and tasks to accomplish before January 1st. Our growth rate and advertising revenue will be greater during this time.


Major Risks with Finances

We may not receive the amount of financing we need from investors. We need around $500,000 in the first year or two to survive and eventually turn a profit. The downturn of the market economy, though unlikely, cause a decrease in the effectiveness of advertising, which would decrease our revenues. Companies may not be willing to invest in our program if they do not have sufficient funds and their employees do not have a dire need for the program.


Economy

The downturn in the economy will probably not affect Web 2.0 companies such as ours. For example, Google recently showed positive financial results, which indicated that Internet advertising is still going strong.


Reduction in Sales

We may not be able to keep up with the rapid growth of users, which may cause scalability and quality of service issues. This may encourage our potential competitors to take action and steal our customers away rapidly. Our customers may be using our service but not clicking on the advertising.


Learning Curves

Because of the rapid development of our service, we will constantly be learning, increasing exponentially our knowledge, which will in turn benefit us financially as we scale out.


Cost Control

We maximize our cost control by eliminating any company-owned purchases of tangible assets and by innovating new ways to maximize the number of users per server on our service.


How Many Times We Will Revisit Financial Statements

We will keep track of our financial statements monthly.


Exact Amount of Financing Requested


Alternative Ways of Financing

Family and friends, government grants, and winning additional competitions (regional, national, global, etc.).

Clarifications


The following financial concepts are not included because they do not apply to our company. We do not own tangible assets, have no inventory, and have no debt liabilities, so these ratios do not apply to our business.




Works Cited

  1. www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/08statab/educ.pdf
  2. www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/21/facebook-is-almost-23-women-and-other-stats/
  3. www.census.gov/prod/1/pop/p25-1129.pdf
  4. www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html
  5. www.tns-mi.com/news/03082005.htm
  6. finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=GOOG
  7. blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=114

Appendices

Research Summaries:

Personal Assistant Outsourcing Services

Simple Meeting Schedulers and Traditional Event Planners

Agents of Value

We are a Webmaster Staffing Company, and we specialize in finding full-time programmers, graphic designers, journalists, researchers, and link builders to help your business grow. With webmaster staffing, you directly choose and manage the staff who will work on your project’s success.

Our staff offices are located in the Philippines. This means you get an educated staff at a very cost effective price. A full time agent starts at just $625 per month. Take the time to review the benefits of working with us, or contact us right away to get started.

Virtual Assistant

Skills: Excellent oral and written English, Internet savvy and speed typer


Ask Sunday

Sunday gives busy people the resources of a 24/7 personal assistant, travel agent, project assistant, and tech support pro available via both email and telephone. Sunday's affordable virtual assistant service is available across the US, Canada, UK and Australia and will be expanding to other major cities around the world. Membership plans start at $19 per month for 10 requests and are on a month-to-month basis.  A Sunday membership provides access to our broad base of virtual assistance.  There are no fees to join and no annual contracts.
 
Here Are Just Some Sunday's Virtual Assistant Services
  • Set appointments
  • Online and phone purchases
  • Make restaurant reservations
  • Dispute charges/file complaints
  • Address changes/updates
  • Make international calls
  • Book travel (air, hotel, car)
  • Find goods and services 
  • Book taxi/car service
  • Schedule wake-up calls
  • 411 - phone number/address info
  • Arrange messenger/errand service

Doodle
http://www.doodle.ch/main.html

        Doodle is a Web-based service for finding suitable dates for group events (e.g., an appointment, a conference call, a family reunion, etc.). Doodle is particularly useful to people who do not use a common calendar or groupware system. In addition to scheduling events, Doodle also supports polls in general. That is, groups can also conveniently decide on options other than dates: the movie for the next movie night, the logo of the new Web site, the restaurant for the Christmas dinner, etc. No registration is required. Doodle is developed and operated by Michael Näf and Paul Sevinç, who have founded the company Inturico Engineering GmbH for that purpose.


Time and Date AS- focus on international meetings

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

         The World Clock Meeting Planner. Need to make a call to someone far away? Need to arrange a video conference, telephone- or net-based meeting with several people spread around the globe? This utility should help you find a convenient time, so that no one has to be up during the middle of the night.


TimeToMeet- generic meeting scheduler *

http://www.timetomeet.info/


Tasks Everyday- comprehensive personal assistant

http://www.taskseveryday.com/index.html

         Your Dedicated Virtual Assistant can work around the clock, nights, weekends or anytime you choose, that’s why we at Tasks Everyday call them VA247. You will get a Dedicated Phone Number which is of your local area code, to reach your VA247, so no more waiting in queues trying to get hold of a real person. All your calls will be answered directly by your VA247. Our ever growing team of 250+ professionals, Smart Graduates, Software professionals, Video & Graphics experts, health care experts, Research Experts, Financial Experts, Accountants, Attorneys, Management & Engineering experts, Statisticians ….. Experts from virtually all industries. Your tasks could be the simplest ones or most complex, you will surely find the required resource at the costs you can afford!


Get Friday

https://getfriday.com/index.php

We aim to provide all the skills and knowledge of an Executive Assistant to you, even though we may be a thousand miles away. We can do any task that doesn’t need our physical presence and can be carried out over e-mail, telephone, fax and the Internet. When you sign up for a GetFriday membership, you will be assigned one Primary Assistant (PA). Your PA will be the only person that you communicate with and hand all your tasks to. You will be in contact with your PA via e-mail, telephone, fax, or online chat services. Once she has received a task she will either carry it out herself or delegate it to another member of the team. In effect, you are not just hiring one single assistant. You are hiring an assistant with access to a pool of expertise (technology skills, creative skills, customer relationship skills) and backup support. You don’t get that luxury when you hire a single, in-house employee.If the task involves skills that we don’t have in-house, such as web design, Photoshop or statistical analysis, then the job will be outsourced to a specialist in Bangalore. These specialized skills come at a premium, and you will be charged extra for them. The rates will be confirmed with you before starting the task.


Meeting Wizard

http://www.meetingwizard.com/mwiz/home/default.cfm

Free basic service. 

We are committed to providing a free service as the best way to encourage new users to explore what our service has to offer.

Due to heavy demand, we are limiting the maximum number of participants to 50 per meeting request on an interim basis. This should accommodate a full 99% of meeting requests.

MeetingWizard automatically does the following:

MeetingWizard requires only that you and your participants have access to e-mail and a browser.  It uses the simplest technologies possible, ensuring that all of your guests will be able to use the system. MeetingWizard has been designed to be effective in more than 90% of meeting planning situations, and does not try to fulfill every possible need.  However, it allows for enough flexibility to make changes, add personalized notes, make cancellations and handles most other situations that might arise.


The system typically works in a 3-step process. 

1. You invite participants providing a number of optional dates/times.

2. Participants respond to invitations by indicating when they are available.

3. You confirm the meeting or event after reviewing responses.

In addition, there are many other features that ensure you don't forget important details, and that all participants receive complete information about meetings.


Meet-O-Matic
Meet-O-Matic is a meeting planning application with a difference you can experience for yourself in 2 minutes, with no registration ever required. Most workgroup software (groupware) to deal with schedule, diary, timetable and meeting constraint problems lies unused after the first few meeting scheduling experiences. Meet-O-Matic (Meetomatic) is a meeting scheduler that does not constrain participants to share a common diary or even to use a common platform - you can propose and schedule meetings online and invite participants using your own email system, then monitor responses to your meeting invitation as they arrive and are displayed in Meet-O-Matic's intuitive visual constraint table.

Timebridge
http://www.timebridge.com/home.php

         Personal Scheduling Manager

         TimeBridge has introduced the first Personal Scheduling Manager designed to help busy people find a time to meet—fast. This innovative, new web application works across calendaring systems, companies and time zones. TimeBridge’s one-step scheduling is the most efficient way to schedule meetings with large groups or individuals across time zones, calendaring systems and companies. TimeBridge allows users to easily schedule meetings, share their availability with others, and connect directly with calendars including Outlook and Google Calendar. While online calendars help users track their time, TimeBridge facilitates the social, and often complex process of getting busy people together — in person, on the phone or online. And TimeBridge is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms.


Tungle
http://www.tungle.com/Home/svc/Home
        Tungle is a FREE, effective and simple meeting coordinator. Tungle saves time coordinating meetings. Use it to share availability with anyone before sending a meeting invitation. Tungle works across organizations, independent of the calendar or groupware system used.
Share your availability- View the availability of friends, colleagues or business associates before sending them a meeting invitation.
Coordinate meetings with anyone- Create Tungle Spaces - temporary web sites for coordinating meetings with anyone, including people who don't have Tungle. Use your existing calendar- Get started in seconds, using your existing calendar across firewalls and organizations.

Evite

http://www.evite.com/


Facebook


MySpace

 



You should make 2 copies of the report in full for future reference. -Cortland Klein 3/11/08 8:15 PM