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E- Ternity- Business- Plan
E-Ternity - tomorrow's business in need of today's investment Statement of purpose:
E-Ternity is a company established in April 2007, that specializes in delivering web services to users. The company is seeking growth capital in the amount of $10000 for the purpose of advertising, product development, and maintenance. Funding is needed in 4 months time by 15 September 2007, when the company is going to have finished its product and will start advertising. The increased advertising will result in generating income for the company in the form of subscriptions, e-products sales and on the website advertising. Repayment of the loan can begin within 15 days of the first month of incoming revenue. The Business:
Description of the business: E-Ternity is a virtual cemetery, a place where people can tell other people their life stories, a place where they can be remembered in time. The virtual graveyard is special in the way that it is much more than a tag of someone’s existence, as it is in a physical cemetery; it is the story of someone’s life. Users can record text, video and audio on their personal profiles and friends can leave memoirs and messages. People remain therefore ‘alive’ through their thoughts, memories, and through what their friends think of them. Because E-Ternity is designed to be a virtual extension of the existing reality, here, people can buy e-candles and e-flowers for the loved ones. The element of the virtual and what makes it a business is that people will have to buy ‘tickets’ for E-Ternity. The first seven years on the website are promotional, after which an extension will require monetary compensation. After the seven year grace-period, thickets will be available for 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, 75 years and for E-Ternity. The legal structure of the business is straight-forward, rights of ownership and decision being granted entirely to Victor Andrei, the owner of the company. Products or services:
The product of the company is a web service in the social networking category. The company sells membership to this service and also complementary e-products to the thematic of the business. Consequently the e-products consist in : e-candles, e-flowers, e-caskets, and e-tombstones. Management
In the first 6 months the company will be managed by Victor Andrei, the developer and owner of the company. Due to the low profile of the company in this period, Victor Andrei will manage both the development, marketing and financial department of the company. Although Victor Andrei has some experience in finance and programming, throughout this 6 months he will seek advice from experts in both fields. After 6 months, there will be co-partnership between Victor Andrei and Vlad Andrei. Vlad Andrei will be a great asset to the company due to his extended technical background in programming, and database management. He is a bright, innovative and motivated individual, with high potential of growth. Depending on the evolution of the company in maximum three months from the partnership between Victor Andrei and Vlad Andrei, the company will employ a VP for Marketing and a VP for Finance and three other software developers. Marketing
Target Market
Although, the services provided by E-Ternity will be universally available, our website is targeted at senior citizens. Among the senior citizens, we expect that only the more affluent part of our audience will use the service, after our first few advertising and promotion campaigns we hope that most of the senior citizens will considering purchasing this service. We will try to gradually extend our audience to all the age groups by associating our service to the kind of service an insurance company offers. The two services are somewhat similar in the way that they are both successions of the unfortunate event of death.
Competition
Although we are going to face tough competition form a couple of websites in the same market niche, we believe that our product will be of superior quality, mainly because we are trying to create a virtual reality of what a cemetery is, we are trying to create an experience. We are bringing the physical reality into the virtual, and we built upon it. Our website is going to incorporate features from all related websites such as www.virtual-memorials.com/ , www.ancestry.com, www.rest-in-peace.com, or www.worldgardens.com and will have a great amount of originality.
Advertising
We hope that Advertising is going to be our secret weapon, which will help us get acknowledged, and develop. Considering that we are already in a web 2.0 environment we will try to advertise wisely by incorporating the web 2.0 phenomenon in our advertising scheme.
Since the funds that are available right now are limited, we will focus our advertising campaign on in the online medium. Thinking web 2.0, 45% of our campaign will be blog-advertsing, 20 % will be advertising on other websites, and 35% will be paid advertising. We will use Google ads, Facebook ads and Yahoo ads in terms of paid advertising. We plan to invest $800 dollars monthly for advertising for the first 6 months, which will total to $4800 dollars. After that we hope that our blog advertising network will be sufficiently wide to lower the costs of paid advertising.
Pricing
We will have free of charge service on the website for the first 7 years of subscription. After the promotional period, tickets will be sold for an extended period. Each year of subscription will cost $10 therefore, for a 25 year ticket will cost $250, a 50 year ticket will cost $500 and an E-Ternity ticket will cost $1000.
We will also sell e-candles- $1 each, e-flowers $2 each bouquet, e-tombstones $ 10- $30 dollars each, and e-caskets $15-$50 each.
Another marketing strategy we are going to employ is product bundling of e-tickets and e-products.
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Financial needs
As expressed in our statement of purpose, will are in need of $10000 dollars. Half of the amount (approximately $4800) is going to be spent on e-advertising over a period of 6 months. The remaining $5200 is going to be divided between product development and affiliated costs and employee salaries over an one year period. We estimate that $1000 will be spent on product development on : web-domain purchase, and software purchase. The rest $4200 will be spent on employee monthly salaries.
Income Projections for the first year:
Within three months from our advertising campaign debut (which will be 6 months from now) we expect an average monthly income of $500. We anticipate that this budget will be a result of our e-product sales, rather than our e-tickets sales. We are making this assumption because we believe it will take more than three months to build customer confidence will have as a result a prolonged membership subscription(e-tickets).
We hope that our income will increase steadily with $200 monthly. In this rhythm by the end of one year we will have a total incoming revenue of $6000(an average of $1000/month). From this amount will still encounter advertising costs of $400 month and $200 maintenance costs. The rest of the $400 will be reimbursed to your company.
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