Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contact:
Patrick J. Cushing
978.852.5267
pcushing@enterventure.com
Connecting Entrepreneurs
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY............................................................................................................................4
COMPANY OVERVIEW..............................................................................................................................6
DESCRIPTION...................................................................................................................................................6
CURRENT STATUS.............................................................................................................................................6
SHORT-TERM OBJECTIVES.................................................................................................................................6
LONG-TERM OBJECTIVES..................................................................................................................................6
MANAGEMENT TEAM...............................................................................................................................8
OBJECTIVES.....................................................................................................................................................8
PATRICK CUSHING............................................................................................................................................8
SOLOMON KAHN..............................................................................................................................................8
MARKET ANALYSIS..................................................................................................................................10
MARKET SIZE................................................................................................................................................10
TARGET MARKET...........................................................................................................................................11
COMPETITOR LANDSCAPE.................................................................................................................................11
THE WEBSITE............................................................................................................................................13
DESCRIPTION.................................................................................................................................................13
BETA BUILD..................................................................................................................................................14
FUTURE FEATURES..........................................................................................................................................14
MARKETING STRATEGY........................................................................................................................15
Online Strategy.....................................................................................................................................15
Personal Networking............................................................................................................................15
PARTNERSHIPS................................................................................................................................................15
INTERNATIONAL..............................................................................................................................................16
PRINT MEDIA................................................................................................................................................16
RISKS............................................................................................................................................................17
MARKET REJECTION.......................................................................................................................................17
COMPETITORS................................................................................................................................................17
GROWTH PROJECTIONS........................................................................................................................18
TIMELINE......................................................................................................................................................18
USER GROWTH..............................................................................................................................................18
FINANCIAL OUTLOOK............................................................................................................................19
COMPARATIVE MARKET VALUE .......................................................................................................................19
INCOME STATEMENT........................................................................................................................................19
STATEMENT OF CASH FLOWS............................................................................................................................19
BREAK EVEN POINT.......................................................................................................................................20
Revenue Projection...............................................................................................................................20
Cost Projection.....................................................................................................................................21
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Enter Venture will provide a private community website for entrepreneurs to share ideas
and obtain feedback, track their business progress, find people, and eventually access
resources such as early stage funding and service providers.
Young entrepreneurs will continue to be the drivers of new ideas and business models;
however, they often make avoidable mistakes and cross stumbling blocks because of
their lack of industry experience. By organizing and aligning this community with shared
goals, Enter Venture hopes to create a new model for creating successful businesses.
Enter Venture will give its initial community of entrepreneurs access to the thing they
need most – information – for the price they require – free. By lowering this
informational barrier, Enter Venture’s private, online community will encourage and
support the creation of new businesses and a loyal user base.
With a private platform, Enter Venture will allow entrepreneurs to share information
about their businesses that they would be hesitant to share publicly. This newfound
openness will help bring clarity to the often opaque world of entrepreneurship thereby
opening up lines for feedback and the opportunity for others to leverage past
experience.
The founders of Enter Venture consider themselves a part of their initial target market
because they too desire access to the greater entrepreneurial community.
- Facebook groups
- Meetup groups
- LinkedIn Services
- Incomplete, public community sites
- Niche feedback sites
- Countless blogs and podcasts
The market is ripe for consolidation and de-fragmentation and by aligning incentives
correctly, Enter Venture believes it can create one community for this market.
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- Find information
- Find similar entrepreneurs
- Ask questions
- Post business ideas, experiences, milestones
- Share files, links
- Obtain feedback on business plans and recorded pitches
- Compare their progress to their peers
- Organize into groups of companies, trade groups, similar interests, etc
Subsequent releases will extend the usefulness of Enter Venture by allowing users to:
The earliest user communities will come largely from the founders’ connections in New
York and Boston, then growing to the greater US, and then internationally. The
company will use a targeted online and personal marketing campaign to attract users to
the site by developing content on the Enter Venture blog, leveraging the existing
fragmented marketplace, and personally networking with existing entrepreneurial
educators, advisers, and trade groups.
Enter Venture will enjoy modest advertising revenue during it’s first year of growth. The
company will move to attract more users to increase the value of that advertising with its
targeted marketing campaign while developing other business supporting and revenue
generating features. During the second and third years, Enter Venture will move to
support service provider transactions, job postings, and funding services to create direct
revenue streams from monthly and transaction fees.
The company will be heavily bootstrapped for it’s initial beta release. The founders will
provide the initial capital to purchase servers, marketing materials, and to cover other
incidental costs. After its beta release and the creation of a community of 50,000 users,
the company will seek $1,000,000 to support a team of up to 10-15 employees for it’s
first two years of full-time operations. The company is currently not looking for outside
investment until it has developed met these goals.
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COMPANY OVERVIEW
Description
We want to connect new business owners with their universal needs of information,
people, capital, and services to better enable their success. We think that this will help
create a wealth of entrepreneurial dialog and collective experience to enlighten an often
opaque process.
By focusing on building an online platform that helps create new businesses, value, and
ideas, we think there will be variety of opportunities for our financial success.
We want to build a community of entrepreneurs that will help spur more entrepreneurs,
better entrepreneurs. Enter Venture plans to lower the barrier to entry for new
businesses by providing better access to information, people, and resources. Ensuring
easier creation of new businesses will be good for investors, good for entrepreneurs,
and good for Enter Venture.
Current Status
Enter Venture is an early stage company in the process of developing its management
team, building its website, and establishing day-to-day operations. The current
management team consists of Patrick Cushing and Solomon Kahn, but they are looking
to bring on a partner that will lead the development of the Enter Venture website. The
management team currently resides in New York City but would consider relocating all
or part of its team in order to ensure long-term success.
Short-Term Objectives
Enter Venture will create an early prototype for a personal network of entrepreneurs
within 4 months of development with a larger beta release targeted for month 6. The
company will then move to slowly nurture the site’s community with a personal
networking campaign and an invite-only campaign for other new users.
Management sees the short-term stage ending once the site has successfully attracted
50,000 active users in the community. At this time, the founders will move to begin
working on Enter Venture full-time.
Long-Term Objectives
The company has developed an initial long-term development strategy to align the
interests of the website with the various players in the entrepreneurial community that
we think will support a long-term, profitable company that supports entrepreneurs.
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Future releases of the website will allow anyone to join the community, opening up the
reach of the website to the larger Internet audience. Enter Venture will extend the
website with job and partner postings, funding competitions, service providers, and early
seed investments. This will help increase the length of user visits to Enter Venture,
increase the value of our advertising space, and provide more consistent and diversified
revenue streams.
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MANAGEMENT TEAM
Objectives
We intend to run the business until our vision of a website with a large, thriving
community and profitable business is realized. At that time, the management plans to
sell the company or transition into an advisory role with day-to-day operations being
handed over to professional managers. We anticipate reaching this milestone 5+ years
after the launch of the site.
Patrick Cushing
Patrick Cushing has taken an interest in entrepreneurship since college and has a
background working with software developers in both India and New York.
Solomon Kahn
Solomon Kahn has also been involved in entrepreneurial activities since his sophomore
year in college when he started "The Comical", a New York City comedy magazine.
Beginning with a small base in the comedy clubs of New York, the magazine grew to a
distribution of over 40,000 in New York and Boston. It attracted comedians such as
Dave Attell, Colin Quinn, Jackie Mason, Lewis Black and George Carlin. He also ran
his own comedy club called "Comedy on Columbus".
Solomon is currently working for Enter Venture part-time while working full-time as a
securities analyst for Wall Street Access. He is the lead analyst in their wealth
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management division where he works on a fund of funds, multiple equity portfolios, and
overall business strategy.
Previously, he worked as a product manager at MBI Inc, a $500 million consumer goods
company, where he was responsible for overseeing 34 jewelry lines, nine of which he
launched.
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MARKET ANALYSIS
Market Size
The Ewing Marion Kauffman foundation, the leading foundation on the study of
entrepreneurship, released the “Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity” in 2005
where it found that .33% of the population aged 20-34 creates a business each month.
In 2000, the Census shows this population to number roughly 60 million people in the
US, which translates into nearly 200,000 businesses created by this demographic each
month. Over the past 15 years, entrepreneurship rates have remained relatively
constant through both ups and downs in the economic cycle.
According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), over 600,000 businesses are
started each year in the US. There are over 20 million sole proprietorships and nearly 6
million businesses with fewer than 100 employees.
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online search for business plan competitions showed at least 150 of these programs
across the country ranging from the Moot Corp’s “Super Bowl of Business Plan
Competitions”, undergraduate competitions like the MIT Entrepreneurship Challenge
and Columbia’s E-Challenge, graduate competitions like the Global Social Venture
challenge, and everything in between.
After college, entrepreneurs find a more limited landscape for support in their
endeavors. Aside from the list of online networks above, Enter Venture has found only
a few early seed investment programs that target companies for around $15,000
investment and advice model. These programs include Y Combinator, TechStars, the
newly created LaunchBoxDigital, and there are more being developed.
Target Market
Enter Venture has also been sure to personally meet with a group of young
entrepreneurs to be sure we are addressing universal entrepreneurial needs. These
entrepreneurs are at varying stages, but are typically very early ventures that are
moving to seek funding. These companies include a website community investment
model for funding movie development, a lifestyle consumer products company, a
facebook application provider, a software firm targeting applications for small
businesses, a snack delivery service, etc.
This group is independent, loves talking about their businesses, and loves hearing
about other businesses. The Enter Venture team has had little problem finding
entrepreneurs that want to share their experience.
Competitor Landscape
Other Websites
A variety of websites offer business advice or resources for entrepreneurs, but many of
these sites present general information, address only one piece of entrepreneur’s
needs, or have poorly designed sites that discourage proliferation. There are few
private community entrepreneurial websites and none that have filled this space.
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with a forum, blog, and
other features. The site
tends to have infrequent
home page updates and is
directed only at website
start-ups.
YoungEntrepreneur.com This is similar to
startupping.com, but is
directed at young
entrepreneurs. Their user
interface is confusing and
clunky, and they have
grown to only 30,000 users
in 7 years.
MyPartnerUp.com Allow users to find potential
business partners, but does
not encourage viral, user-
generated growth because
of its limited feature set
GoBigNetwork.com
Table?
In-Person Support
Enter Venture would be vying for the attention of entrepreneurs with access to a variety
of in-person services. Where it makes sense, the company will move to partner with
these services to ensure effective coverage of this market. There are a variety of in-
person resources entrepreneurs can avail themselves of. College students have the
previously mentioned entrepreneurship programs, centers, and business plan
competitions. There are governmental organizations such as the Small Business
Association that support new business development as well.
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THE WEBSITE
Description
The founders have outlined their vision for how they think they might support
entrepreneurs in the following development plan, but ultimately supporting our users is
of the utmost importance. After the beta release, future development decisions will be
reevaluated to include user feedback and trends.
The Enter Venture website, found at enterventure.com, will be a private community that
will allow users to:
- Find information
- Find similar entrepreneurs
- Ask questions
- Post business ideas, experiences, milestones
- Share files, links
- Obtain feedback on business plans and recorded pitches
- Compare their progress to their peers
- Organize into groups of companies, trade groups, similar interests, etc
The website’s beta release will be developed around the needs of the initial user
community for the website – entrepreneurs. The site will be focused on information
sharing and user connections by leveraging blogs, Q&A, groups, and contacts. A typical
use case for a new user at Enter Venture might look like this:
1. Receive an invite email from a friend about Enter Venture and navigate to the site
2. Create a user name and password
3. Browse entrepreneur stories on the Home page
4. Search for information particular to your industry
5. Subscribe to a person or company for future updates
6. Modify your own profile, subscriptions, and blog
Subsequent returns to the site by the user will allow them to:
1. Come back to the site to update the community with your experiences, helping
improve your user ranking
2. Post milestones to demonstrate progression
3. Post your elevator pitch for feedback from the community
4. Review the updates from your subscriptions
5. Find users to fill your new strategic needs
Enter Venture will put heavy emphasis on creating a simple but extendable user
interface to ensure entrepreneurs feel that the site matches the style of their schedule
and lifestyle. This is why the community will be kept manageable in the short-term to
ensure these issues are more easily addressed. In the long-term, we may move to
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include smart browser interface features like drag & drop file sharing, or a browser plug-
in that enables easy sharing of useful website URLs, mobile platform adjusted sites, etc.
Enter Venture will be built with a stress on users’ ability to control the privacy of their
content and interactions on the site. Establishing a safe environment for users to
discuss their business will reassure the trust of our users and enable various degrees of
participation on the site.
Beta Build
Enter Venture is in the midst of the planning stages for the website. We have listed out
our initial beta feature set along with a rough, long-term development plan and release
timeline. We are currently developing workflows for the website to gain a better
understanding of the site’s architecture.
Enter Venture’s number one priority is finding a co-founder to develop the website, but
in the meantime the founders will be able to move on other fronts for the website. A lot
of the graphic design and user interface can be developed before the developer joins
the team. Using the workflows, Enter Venture will look to interface design contacts in
India to develop the site mock-ups to help better realize the idea and communicate this
to a developer.
Future Features
Future features of the website will build on the existing communities needs. Two places
where the Enter Venture team will target the needs of entrepreneurs are with early seed
funding and service provider transactions. These will build on earlier features by
allowing users to:
Service providers are a target area where Enter Venture can help aid its user
community and generate revenue. There are a several services that almost every new
business needs, regardless of the industry: legal services, marketing and graphic
design, website services, etc. Recommendations are essential to selecting the right
service providers
Funding competitions will lend perfectly to the Enter Venture community. Business plan
competitions could be hosted from the platform in order to leverage lasting connections
with award recipients while seed funding organizations will have an even greater
interest in tracking the success of the companies they invest in.
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MARKETING STRATEGY
Online Strategy
Before the site is launched, Enter Venture will track and advertise the creation of their
company with a blog and podcast series at enterventure.com/blog. This will be the first
testing ground for the company with an account of entrepreneurs we meet, mistakes we
make, milestones we attain, and anything else that is a part of starting our company.
Personal Networking
Colleges will become the backbone of our earliest person networking efforts because
they present a user group with spare time, are well-versed in online communities, and
will be able to grow with the development of the Enter Venture site.
We will initially contact the heads of the entrepreneurial student groups in both
undergraduate and graduate business schools to develop a committed user community.
Aside from college networks, we are particularly interested in working with business
plan competitions and incubation / early investment programs such as Y Incubator and
Tech Stars as they represent pre-formed groups that lend themselves to organized
entrepreneurial communities.
Partnerships
Enter Venture will look to partner with existing entrepreneurial groups and similarly
aligned organizations in order to create activity on the site.
Aside from using Enter Venture to support existing early funding companies and
business plan competitions, the opportunity exists for Enter Venture to support its own
funding contests. Cash prized contests would help drive users to the site and generate
site content as well as act as a proof of concept for other funding programs. Enter
Venture would hope to support this competition while finding sponsors to supply the
cash for awards of $5,000 – 20,000.
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Over the long-term, these types of non-investment cash rewards will help pave the way
for investment-type funding.
Enter Venture could naturally support the tracking of alumni from such programs as Y
Combinator and Tech Stars, and both college and private business plan competitions.
These groups have a direct interest in following their alumni’s business interests as
proof of the success of their programs and their own investments.
International
Our analysis to date focuses mainly on the US; however, our site will have an
international reach which presents the opportunity for much larger growth than is
outlined in this plan. An international presence presents its own challenges, but
ignoring this community would mean ignoring the opportunity to create lasting changes
in the way entrepreneurs create businesses.
We hope to use existing connections to India, Israel, and the UK for first connecting the
entrepreneurial community worldwide. This expansion will be especially well timed if
Enter Venture coincided the expansion with the development of early stage investment
services.
Print Media
Enter Venture will also have the opportunity to establish print media such as with a
magazine or book compilation of the site content. Popular blogs have found a market in
redistributing their content in hard copy, and with an archive of entrepreneurial
experience, Enter Venture will be well poised to take advantage of similar opportunities.
This will provide another revenue opportunity with more advertisement space, create a
diversified brand experience, and help attract new users.
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Risks
Market Rejection
The number one risk for the company is that we develop a product that does not
resonate with or support the entrepreneurial community.
Enter Venture is building in as many pre-cautions to ensure that this does not occur.
We will continue to be personally engaged with our market, build in privacy settings for
our users, and partner with existing entrepreneurial groups. The quality of Enter
Venture’s initial community will be essential for setting the tone of the site and ensuring
it becomes a true resource in the world of entrepreneurship.
Competitors
While Enter Venture is most concerned with developing a great product that will ensure
it stays at the forefront of its market, this is a nascent period in the development of
online entrepreneurial communities. The potential exists for another competitor to move
to a position of dominance before Enter Venture can move to compete. Continuously
engaging our market will help us keep abreast of emerging competitors so Enter
Venture can adjust accordingly.
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GROWTH PROJECTIONS
Timeline
Enter Venture’s rough development timeline dictates its user growth predictions. The
rough outline below does not account for other strategic developments such as the
potential to expand internationally or the opportunities to better develop our network
with print and in-person events.
Timeline Milestone
Year 0 Website Development Begins
Year 0, Month 3 Prototype
Year 0, Month 6 Beta Release
Year 1 Funding Competitions
Year 2 Service Provider Tools
Year 3 Seed Funding / Investment Services
User Growth
Based on the slow deployment of features and observed growth from similarly
structured websites, Enter Venture has projected its user growth for the next 5 years.
Our projections assume the ability to directly market to 1,000 people per month with
each user recommending one user per eight months (organic growth). Compared to the
actual growth rates of both Facebook and LinkedIn these assumptions are very
conservative, but due to our more targeted audience, the numbers have been lowered
for more accurate planning.
`
Growth Month Users
8,000,000 1 1,112
7,000,000 2 2,245
6,000,000
3 3,515
5,000,000
4 4,937
5 6,529
4,000,000
Users 6 8,313
3,000,000
12 24,523
2,000,000
24 119,673
1,000,000 36 490,377
0 42 976,032
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Month 54 3,826,730
60 7,561,401
Our current growth projections rely greatly on our ability to generate organic user growth
– the true measure of a great website. By focusing on an exclusive, slowly cultivated
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community, Enter Venture believes it can attain the organic growth necessary to make a
successful website and business.
FINANCIAL OUTLOOK
Comparative Market Value
The valuation for social networking sites on a per user basis has gone up significantly in
recent years. The $300 / user recent Facebook valuation is extremely high and takes
into account a much larger user growth rate than we expect for our site. By supporting
a user group that is more apt to spend money, we feel that Enter Venture can increase
its dollar valuation per user. As a result, we feel that a $100 per user valuation is an
honest representation of what our business will be worth over the next 3-5 years.
Income Statement
The following figures represent Enter Venture’s initial cost and revenue estimates.
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Break Even Point
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
Dollars
0
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35
-50000
-100000
Month
Revenue Projection
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Enter Venture’s revenue projections rely on advertising for the first several months with
job postings soon following. As the community becomes more established, the
company will release features in years 2 and 3 that will charge both monthly and
transaction fees.
Advertising revenue is based on the assumption that enterventure.com real estate will
become more valuable over time, starting at .2 cents per thousand views to 1 cent per
thousand views over 4 years – extremely conservative for the industry.
Job posting estimates take into account the rate of job postings per user on sites such
as linkedin; however, our estimates only account for a fee of $50 per posting, versus
$200 or $300 per posting at other sites, due to a user base that we believe will be less
willing to spend money to fill its ranks.
Service provider fees are taken directly from Elance.com with premium users opting for
a $10/month fee and all transactions yielding a $1.50 fee. Investment services currently
have no online comparison, but Enter Venture estimates it will be able to charge $25 per
month for premium users and $5 per transaction, at least. The company is currently
researching percentage-based fees for seed investment services; however, they have
been advised there are potential legal pitfalls with this method.
Cost Projection
Enter Venture’s cost estimates assume several milestones and employee growth
requirements. The timeline for the company’s Year 1 revenue figures match the Year 1
cost figures outlined above; Year 0 cost figures represent pre-incorporation costs. The
company anticipates requiring office space 6 months after incorporation at which time it
will require investment in office furniture, hardware, etc.
Enter Venture’s costs are directly tied to employee growth with roughly 70% of its costs
owed to salaries so effectively leveraging its human capital will be of the utmost
importance to Enter Venture.
Funding
Enter Venture will be heavily bootstrapped until the company moves out of its short-term
strategy. The company will require roughly $15,000 to get through this initial phase – an
amount that will be funded through the personal investment of the founders as well as
with personal and business loans.
As part of moving out of the short-term, Enter Venture will seek to finance the next 2
years of operations with an initial investment round of $1-2 million dollars. At this time,
the company hopes to find an investment partner that offers industry experience,
connections, and expertise.
Assets
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Enter Venture currently owns the following web domains and will soon move to
trademark its logo:
enterventure.com
enterventure.org
enterventure.co.uk
enterventure.co.in
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