• Product and product vision
  • Breakthrough in the Web 2.0 interface
    • Only Google Spreadsheet has the infinite scroll down
  • Works with images, audio, video
    • YouTube synergy is very valuable
  • Integration with twitter, rss, google, phone camera, email, paypal, bookmarklet in browser, right-click interface
• Very light competition in our direct value proposition
  • de.licio.us is the largest, and they are tiny tiny
  • Nothing new in note-taking since mindmapping
• R&D Execution
• Customer Relationship Management
  • Automated
  • Clever use of emails
    • Get permissions
    • Capture their birthdays like Myspace
    • Capture their zipcodes and tell them about events
    • Advertiser opportunities
    • Subscriber value add opportunities
• Network effects
• Demonstrations and customer evangelism
  • Video how-to contests !!!
• Search Engine Optimization
• Surprise
• Willingness To Pay – this product meets many needs, and these needs become more sophisticated over time while still subject to lock-in.
• Establish A Platform – many derivative innovations from the “notes” paradigm; adopt best practices for platform leadership.
  • PeopleMath:
    • powerful network effects
    • ride on Twitter’s coattails
    • profiles and viral adoption
• Brand.
• Innovation Replacement Theory
  • Beat our direct competition
    • Product dominance (by far over Stikkit, Webnote, Bubbl.us)
    • Web 2.0 value added (beats Mindjet, MS OneNote, Word, Notebook)
    • Brand dominance
    • Functionality nobody else has
    • Interface goodness
    • Marketing focus, reach, and quality (viral emphasis)
  • Integrate the best of Web 2.0
    • Business models: second life, hotornot
    • Customization
    • Collaboration
    • Community
    • Tagging
• Victory in the STUDENT segment
  • No direct competition
  • Team note taking is the killer app, and wikis don’t cut it
  • Addresses and solves a clear and pressing need: how to pass !
  • Student evangelists (eventually internship program)
  • leads to other segments
  • business school founding mythos: public relations
• Lock-in and switching costs, coupled with ease of switching in (data entry options, account simplicity etc)
• Ease of immediate use
• Depth of ultimate immersion into our platform
• Usage flexibility
  • different uses for different people
  • easy to make it your home
  • market specifically to each segment with usage help documentation
• Public relations
  • Viral marketing and word of mouth
  • Web 2.0 blogs
  • Contests and awards
  • Buzz through influencers
  • Teasers and pranks
• Business Model
  • High rate of conversion to subscription accounts
  • Direct sponsors
    • Video Push Ads
    • Cost Per Action
  • Virtual goods
  • Marketplace
    • Hyper-easy cost-per-action
    • Beats eBay and Craigslist at tapping the Long Tail for actual transactions
• Low overhead and operations requirements

Company Name And Location

MetaNotes, Inc., is a Delaware corporation based in North Carolina represented by the Raleigh law firm of Smith, Anderson, Blount, Dorsett, Mitchell & Jernigan LLP at PO Box 2611, Raleigh NC 27602-2611.

Ownership And Legal Status

The MetaNotes Corporation filed its first motions to incorporate on 7/7/2007 and expects completion of incorporation proceedings in early August. As of the present moment all of the stock will be assigned to CEO Srini Kumar, and a chunk of equity will be traded with CTO John Beppu in exchange for an assignment of invention of the code and ongoing coding efforts. The company is cleared for trademarking the term “MetaNotes” and will set the trademark and patent-search process in motion immediately.

Company History, Milestones, and Development To Date

MetaNotes.com began as a blog created by Srini Kumar. Kumar has been a blogger since years before Blogger.com existed, and during his MBA education at the University of North Carolina became fascinated with Microsoft Excel. Having experience as a web designer, he found the “Save For Web” feature of Excel to be an excellent way to publish DHTML without having to know anything about it, and snared the name MetaNotes.com on 12/7/2006. Several weeks later, John Beppu contacted Kumar to show him the completed MetaNotes.com prototype, inspired by the sprawling layout of MetaNotes as well as apocryphal “specifications” related deep in the content of the blog. Since that time, some changes to the prototype have been made, but more significantly Kumar developed the vision of promoting MetaNotes.com as a serious Web 2.0 project that could provide the foundation for a successful firm. A detailed product roadmap, hours of market research, and hundreds of sample MetaNotes pages later, our team is ready to hunker down and code the beta test. We hope to have revenue streams in place for our beta test that will bring money into our bank account soon after beta launch.

Services

MetaNotes plans to offer four different styles of service:

• MetaNotes Basic – the free service, connected with our Marketplace but only allowing for a minimum of worksheets; this is a play for broad adoption and Long Tail advertiser and merchandising economics
• MetaNotes Premium – offering different colors of notes, more worksheets, and other value-added services; this revenue goes straight to our bottom line
• MetaNotes Enterprise – deployment of the MetaNotes paradigm as a superior wiki solution behind the firewall at large and mid-sized enterprises, perhaps in conjunction with the Salesforce.com API; priced on a per-seat basis
• Advertising And Sponsorship Solutions – providing advertisers a superior and accountable way to get their products and brands in front of an online audience

Industry Developments And Trends

MetaNotes is well positioned to take advantage of significant opportunities for user value and concomitant userbase and revenue growth that follow from the Web 2.0 suite of innovations. These innovations include:

• Technology innovations such as XML, DHTML, Ruby On Rails, RSS and API’s allowing alternative interface designs and interactivity (both on-screen and with a database)
• Functionality innovations such as tagging, Flash audio and video objects, “widgets” and collaborative filtering
• Business model innovations such as “virtual goods”, pay-per-click and pay-per-action context-sensitive advertising, and platform/ecosystem innovation theory

The Internet is a fairly new industry, and “Web 2.0” (a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2003) is a slippery concept which is meant to convey a basket of new projects and technologies that could transform the use of the Internet from passive consumption of information to active creation and collaboration. Our firm defines “Web 2.0” as anything online that resembles an “application” rather than simply a content source or navigation tool. According to this definition, Web 2.0 began with the launch of Hotmail and kicked into high gear with Blogger, the first broadly accepted self-publishing tool. Social networking, one of the most popular of the Web 2.0 portfolio, made its debut with the creation of Friendster, which let users invite one another to an “intranet”-like system. After the market disruption caused by the bursting of the dot-com bubble in late 2000 and the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001, Web 2.0 projects such as Myspace, de.licio.us, Flickr and YouTube eclipsed the first wave of interactive projects, each acquired for millions of dollars and rolled into larger Internet companies such as Yahoo! and Google, who are hungry for “cool new tools” and seeking competitive advantage through the acquisition of locked-in audiences and proprietary business models.

The key to success in this industry is crossing the chasm. Web 2.0 “aficionados” form a tight community of early adoption, but focusing on the needs of this community for complicated features such as an API may doom the project to a tiny userbase. This is the case with Friendster, which appealed mostly to dorky intellectual college kids at first and alienated the rest of the Internet market with its cheesy brand and vapid user community. Myspace, which crossed the chasm correctly, focused on an initial target segment of bands, and provided for these bands a place where they could distribute their music for free, network with their fans, and promote their shows and merchandise. Soon these bands brought their fans in, and the network now boasts millions of users and multiplying service extensions into video and television under the leadership of its new owner, News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch. In light of this evidence, we plan to offer our service to Web 2.0 users in an almost off-hand manner, indeed considering dodging this influential audience entirely out of concern for appropriation of the key ideas in our interface by competitors or potential new entrants.

It is hard to predict Web 2.0 firms’ financial performance on a revenue basis. However, Web 2.0 standard-bearers YouTube were acquired by Google for $1.65b late in 2006, and current social network darlings Facebook have turned down their own billion-dollar offers for their six-million-strong userbase and well-conceived platform strategy. Crossing the chasm can be the difference between mediocre and massive, and our strategy of focusing on the needs of students mirrors the successful strategy of Facebook as well as guiding our product development roadmap.

The current lack of a dominant mode for note-taking, as well as the understandable enthusiasm of Internet and young audiences for new free Web 2.0 services, represents an opportunity for MetaNotes to develop a strong brand associated with taking notes and being smarter and passing one’s classes with flying colors among the student segment.

Funding To Date And Funds Sought

Funding of the company to date has been in-kind contributions of labor and computer hosting space from the two founders. No expenses have been incurred to date. Kumar has received a $20,000 loan from his family members to pursue the creation of the MetaNotes Corporation.

The company is now seeking $500,000 in seed funding from outside investors. These funds will be used to open our headquarters, pay for proprietary technology licenses to enhance our competitive advantage against potential new entrants, hire our founders and additional staff, and expand marketing activities to disseminate awareness and drive interest in MetaNotes to high school and college students in the USA.

The MetaNotes Corporation

Executive Summary

What will the world look like after we launch MetaNotes?

Imagine a world where people wrote everything down on Post-It Notes. Except that these Post-It Notes were online, using a website called MetaNotes.com, within a personal web account that scrolled far to the right and down like an Excel spreadsheet.

Imagine if people used MetaNotes as a coherent space to jot down their thoughts, hopes, and dreams. This world would be populated with people who were smarter, if one considers that key components of memory include timely access, repeated exposure, “social memory” and persistence of knowledge, all of which optimal MetaNotes usage behavior would provide. This world would be full of people who never forgot a thing, because it was all written down.

What would people in this world do with MetaNotes?

These users would create a new kind of television by creating (or “VJ’ing”) YouTube video walls; these users would create and share massive scrapbooks of pictures, text, video and widgets through simply right-clicking and selecting “Send To MetaNotes”; these users would buy, sell, trade, engage in projects, play games, and ultimately and inevitably these users would conspire to change the world for the better.

What would MetaNotes do to human minds in such a world?

Imagine these people being able to access all of the notes they wrote down through a search prompt – and we are talking all of their notes, ‘way back to elementary school. Imagine them sharing these notes, creating communities where visitors could post notes with one another, and web users could store the blog entries they like while randomly surfing or doing targeted research.

I have been a user of MetaNotes for several months now, and I have become a far more involved participant in my own life as a consequence. MetaNotes – the first thing I wake up to, the last thing I do before I power down. MetaNotes is the best Web 2.0 project on the planet and has the potential to outshine all that has come before.

My job, as CEO, is to ensure that users make use of the platform that we have created for them. I see MetaNotes as yet another gift that the Internet has bequeathed unto humanity. Using what resources I can muster as an entrepreneur, I hereby dedicate my life to the invocation of this vision of a post-MetaNotes world. Potential investors take heed: MetaNotes.com will be the most important website in the entire world. Forgive the superlatives, but there really is no better way to put it.

This is not arrogance talking; it’s addiction. MetaNotes is the stickiest, most locked-in, most network-effected and most monetizable platform in history. Even Google can be integrated within the MetaNotes platform. MetaNotes is the way people of the near future will want to plan their lives, set and achieve their goals, communicate with one another, and just plain remember. I use MetaNotes for everything, and look what I have accomplished. I believe that MetaNotes will rock the nation like the Emancipation Proclamation. It is up to me and my team to bring this about, and I write this Executive Summary with the hope of connecting with further resources to implement this plan.

The Company

MetaNotes, Incorporated, a Delaware Corporation based in North Carolina, provides a Web 2.0 note-taking tool to students, entrepreneurs, and others who rely on taking notes and want to do so online. Our goal is that MetaNotes become as ubiquitous as Web-based email; it will be unacceptable to be without a MetaNotes account, and that Plus and Infinite subscribers find a host of benefits to their subsidy of the service.

MetaNotes meets three core needs for our users: taking notes (and reviewing notes taken when needed) setting goals and tracking them over time collaborating in a “notes network” (including community and commerce)

Beyond meeting these core needs, MetaNotes is also a simple and feature-rich tool for grabbing content from the Web, adding one’s one annotation, and arranging text, images, audio and video on a page for personal or shared use. As users grow accustomed to MetaNotes, they will use it in creative ways to build content pages for one another as well as our social network community.

The Web 2.0 segment of the Internet industry is characterized by great branding, wild leaps in user value and involvement, and a superheated acquisition environment in which startups barely a year old are acquired for billions. MetaNotes intends to capitalize on that growth. The company’s stock is currently held by President and CEO Srini Kumar (based in Durham NC), with an assignation of work pending in exchange for equity with the primary coder, CTO John Beppu (based in Los Angeles, CA).

Products And Services

The company has created a platform for “note-taking” using an interface that looks like “Post-It Notes” and sprawls invitingly across an Excel-like scrolling workspace. Many MetaNotes are visible on one “worksheet”; an account can contain multiple worksheets (we may charge past a certain number). Our distinctive interface style is recognizable from twenty feet away on a standard laptop screen. This gives the user a unique overview of many ideas in one glance, and the ability to rearrange notes at will makes MetaNotes an ideal outlining tool. MetaNotes can contain text, images, video or audio, and can be dragged and resized magically using proprietary technology.

MetaNotes is incredibly easy to use. New users are treated to delightful and highly targeted introductory experiences such as building out a “GOALS” worksheet through a wizard-driven interface or watching a video about how to best use MetaNotes to lead a study group. We will create user-friendly marketing materials (such as “cheat sheets” for common shortcuts) as well as a community where MetaNotes users can ask and answer questions.

We will sell upgraded features to accounts, creating Basic (free), Gold, Platinum, Education and Enterprise editions of the core software at tiered monthly (or yearly at a discount) subscription pricing. A MetaNotes account is simple to get started to use, but incredibly involving, much as a Microsoft Office application might be – but with a “social networking” and (eventually) an eBay/Amazon/HotorNot twist through which our users will buy and sell real and “virtual” goods. The prototype is currently hosted on a prototype site, which will be transferred to MetaNotes.com before launch.

In addition, “implementations” of the MetaNotes interface technology will be created to provide specialized vertical social networks either on subdomains from MetaNotes.com or on other domains such as PeopleMath.com. These vertical networks will each be centered around a targeted business model, such as auctions, online dating, business planning, or travel, and will attract deeply segmented audiences for which our firm will staff up with topic experts. Key to our planning process is the uncertainty of what within our product is patentable; if we are able to secure and defend look and feel patents, for instance, we may be able to create many different business models to make the most of the Internet traffic our properties will generate.

Target Market MetaNotes will be of particular interest to students and others whose vocation demands regular notetaking and review. Other segments that are of value to us will include the Web 2.0 interest community, entrepreneurs, small businesses, professionals, people interested in planning and personal productivity innovations (such as mindmapping), and general audiences who simply want a place to jot things down that isn’t as complicated as a wiki or will be attracted by our social network and marketplace features. Additional segments will be interested as we drive towards compatibility with other note systems, such as the PalmPilot, Microsoft Outlook, Stikkit and Microsoft Word, helping them switch effortlessly to the MetaNotes platform.

The Competition

People who want to take notes have four options: Use MetaNotes or one of our direct Web 2.0 competitors Use a software application to take notes onto one’s hard drive Use an offline solution, such as a planner or a notebook Not take notes at all, or take them in a haphazard way The first of these options is superior because of the basic Web 2.0 value propositions of universal access through a Web browser, the opportunity for collaboration, speed of data entry, searchability, tagging etc. Very few of the current crop of Web 2.0 projects aspire to help users “take better notes”. Our competition in Web 2.0 includes: bubbl.us – a Flash-driven mind-mapping tool Stikkit.com – basically a “personal-productivity” focused wiki application with some cool data entry models de.licio.us – not really a note-taking application, but a way to “collect and annotate” web pages wikis, such as PBWiki – a complicated mega-blog that allows any user to edit Google Notebook and Google Docs – search saving tool and online word processor/spreadsheets WebNote, an open source project that bears some serious similarities with MetaNotes Additional competition can be considered if one looks at our “oblique” business models: HotOrNot.com also sells “virtual flowers”, as we plan to do within our PeopleMath portal eBay and its subsidiaries PayPal and Craigslist allow easy e-commerce, marketing and payment processing for a “long tail” of sellers – our Marketplace represents direct competition with eBay and Craigslist, and we may consider our own proprietary currency system in the future (unlikely but possible) Google and Microsoft are geared up to battle for online “Office” application supremacy; MetaNotes is a better solution than either company is likely to provide, given our breakthrough interface design. In the software space, where more complicated operations can be conducted resident on a user’s hard drive, the variety of note-taking applications is more robust, but there is no dominant solution: Mindjet MindManager Pro – the best of the “mindmapping” solutions Apple’s Stickies, the closest to our interface, only available to users of the Mac platform Windows-platform Stickies imitators like Crawler Notes and 3M’s Post-It Note Software Microsoft’s OneNote, probably the best thought out note-taking solution, optimized for tablet PCs Palm Desktop and the PalmPilot – basic note, calendar, and contact management software; high market share Also, the Blackberry Microsoft Outlook – scheduling software with rudimentary notetaking Notepad and Word – rudimentary solutions but largest installed base; not a “multi-note workspace” The “competition” with the largest market share is offline, or paper, note-taking systems. These include: The Franklin Planner, DayRunner, and other planning systems Filing systems with hanging folders containing manila folders High-end notebooks such as Moleskine or leather portfolios Commodity notebooks such as those provided by the Mead Corporation of Dayton OH Loose paper (plain or three-hole punched) 3M’s Post-It Notes Complementing these paper products is a range of pens, notably: Sharpie Cross – the prestige pen brand MetaNotes maintains the following advantages over these types of competitors: Fun, awesome and utterly unique interface; intuitive and easy to get started Very basic data model; everything is in “notes”, and notes can contain a wide variety of content types Integrated social networking and (soon) e-commerce and voting Share your notes with teams or a public community Notes can contain images and YouTube video (make a video mixtape) Infinite scrolling and multiple worksheets make this resemble an Office application Searchable and taggable with metatext Notes will eventually be able to contain RSS feeds, Facebook profiles, playlists, and (already) widgets such as are created by Slide and Photobucket (as long as they’re stored within tags) (Soon) collect content from all over the web through a “right-click” data entry model; also Stikkit, Pageflakes, and Twitter API’s

Marketing And Sales Strategy

We will position MetaNotes as the best place to take notes on anything, and will use the slogan “Take Better Notes With MetaNotes” to ensure there is no confusion as to what we do. We will also use the slogan “You Have To Take Notes To Survive” in order to fuel demand and cultivate an aversion to “failing” due to unorganized or non-existent notes. We will promote fun features of the notes, such as “video mixtapes” and image hosting, and build a rapport with the student population that can later be leveraged for other MetaNotes-platform projects such as PeopleMath. Finally, we will promote the concept that MetaNotes is to memory as the wheel is to the foot, a McLuhanism that underscores the benefit of augmented memory through devoted usage.

Our goal is to get people logging in and creating notes for themselves. While awareness is obviously key, without trial, our marketing efforts will be for naught. The stakes are high, as we believe that users will be locked in as soon as they really start using MetaNotes. When people lock onto unique writing, planning or communication systems such as Mindjet Mindmanager, the Franklin Planner or the Blackberry, usage tends to become habitual, and nobody ever wants to lose their old notes.

We will target students through strategic PR to underline the academic origins of this project, through a clever internship program, through contests and through free premium accounts for currently enrolled students. Research we have recently conducted shows a far greater inclination per capita for female students as compared to their male counterparts; we expect to adjust our promotional focus accordingly.

We will staff our marketing operation according to five key tasks: Getting a critical mass of users Getting users to use MetaNotes all the time Getting users to spend money on upgrades and virtual goods Getting sponsors to fund ads, promotions or research initiatives Developing additional business models based on forecasted participation and partnerships We will also quickly adapt MetaNotes to the API for the Twitter service in order to launch PeopleMath, our “social networking hub” where users can make “collections of cool people” through a MetaNotes interface. This will be a robust platform for sales of virtual gifts, such as virtual flowers from men to women. Finally, we will cultivate an ecosystem of partners and power-users who will assist us in evangelism and training in the MetaNotes service; this will begin as a college internship program.

Viral marketing and email marketing will be key elements to attract new users and keep them coming back. Groups will bring more new individuals on board for team planning purposes; usage will spawn more usage as people re-apply their MetaNotes accounts. The goal of our usage strategy is to earn a position as our users’ “home page”, dethroning Yahoo! and other content and search providers.

As we integrate more and more data entry types (such as Microsoft Word) into our model, we believe the user groups for these data types will be very attracted to MetaNotes as an alternative way to keep their existing documents up-to-date and share them with others.

Operations

In order to deliver on its brand promise and innovation potential, the MetaNotes Corporation must dispatch the following activities:

Planning – value proposition, branding, segmentation Prototyping – creating the model of the future application, including all help and wizard screens Corporate Structure – legal structure, representation, bookkeeping, financial management, banking, tax compliance Fundraising – and investor relations Market Research – finding out how people are going to use MetaNotes; developing value propositions, marketing tactics, brand testing, and feature or vertical portal ideas Specifications – turning the raw vision for the product and market research into directives for coding Coding (Engineering) – turning marketing-driven specifications into testable code Testing and Feedback – making sure everything works; soliciting, evaluating and integrating input from beta testers, market research on students, and early adopters Research and Development – including future compatibility with coming multi-touch and 3D operating systems, integration into One Laptop Per Child, offline/online syncing, new file upload and data entry options etc. System Administration – server space and bandwidth – especially if we begin hosting images or video ourselves, or grow explosively Community management – creating a “community of trust” for our Marketplace model, similar to eBay Support and documentation – video, introduction sequence notes, help, FAQ, community, tips and tricks Sales – converting users into subscribers; converting sponsorship interest into advertising contracts Marketing Operations – public relations, material distribution, CRM Partnership – building users, user value, and revenue streams by adapting others’ products or marketing needs to the MetaNotes platform approaching, negotiating, signing and maintaining agreements building a coalition or ecosystem to bolster our support as an independent Web 2.0 property provide the whole product through cooperative bundling and channel arrangements

Management President and Founder Srini Kumar is an MBA from the University of North Carolina and a BA in Sociology from Stanford University. Bringing over ten years of Internet entrepreneurial experience to the MetaNotes Corporation, he is the founder of StickerNation.com, a custom vinyl sticker printing operation that has since 2001 provided small batches of promotional stickers to thousands of Internet customers. CTO and Founder John Beppu is a Ruby On Rails and DHTML wizard who has recently left Shopzilla.com to take on an engineering position at Los Angeles startup Geni.com, a Web 2.0 genealogy tool. The two founders are a synergistic team that is able to conceive and execute user-driven product strategies in stealth. Additionally, should this business acquire either a large enough revenue stream to expand or angel or venture funding, four fellow MBA graduates from UNC are prepared to enter the firm to oversee Operations, Business Development, Marketing and Product Management (Matthew Madsen, Emery Dora, Ron Wen and Ron Clabo). This management team is confident that they can lead Web 2.0 into a new era of usefulness as well as maximize the return our firm realizes from its innovation.

Development We estimate that approximately one week of coding and testing by the founders in person will bring the MetaNotes prototype to beta release.

A prototype has been developed which is in heavy use by the founding team as lead users. It is hosted at http://metanotes.lbox.org and at least fifty separate pages have been created to showcase various use cases for different information creation, gathering and retrieval purposes. The next phase of development is the creation of the beta specification, which will tier various features as “basic”, “premium”, “infinite” and “enterprise”, build in several revenue generation models and convey to the coders the user experience requirements and usage flows. Soon after that, we plan to launch our beta edition at DefCon, a conference for “hackers” held each year in Las Vegas at the beginning of August. A detailed product roadmap is being developed to help us plug the various features into a logical release schedule. In the future, MetaNotes will make investment in coders and system administration a top corporate and financial priority.

Financials

The financial strategy of MetaNotes is as easy as 1-2-3: 1) Build traffic. Attract as many free users as possible Clever promotion Public relations Targeted marketing for students during “back to school” 2007 Empower these users to get other users onboard Bring these users back to the site via permission-based email 2) Integrate a business model. Figure out a way to convert the traffic into dollars. Subscription model. Virtual goods. Usage model. Figure out goods that may be purchased all the time by our users. 3) Convert the traffic into revenue at increasing rates. Create an attractive upgrade pricing model chock-full of value-added features that will convert free users to paid users. Attract sponsors and advertisers without sharing it unduly with ad networks and giving these sponsors many options. Annual projections for MetaNotes.com are difficult to project due to impossible to control factors relating to our success in launch and within the student segment. The financials section of this document therefore creates projections along several different “cases” of user adoption and growth. Conformity with the strategies outlined in this plan will maximize the likelihood of the optimal user (and financial) case.

Funds Sought And Uses

The company is currently seeking $500,000 in investment financing. These funds will be used to hire our founders and build additional features into the product, especially revenue-generating community areas such as the MetaNotes Marketplace. This investment will also enable us to properly promote MetaNotes to students, a large enough segment to warrant marketing focus to promote our product and brand as the best place to take notes ever invented. We will hire a PR firm, develop targeted marketing materials, and create a student intern “street team” to proliferate the MetaNotes brand and value proposition and train new users in how they can use MetaNotes to keep track of the information in their lives. We will approach administrators and faculty with the MetaNotes value proposition in order to find internal champions and colleges. Finally, we plan to hire a college marketing firm such as AlloyMarketing.com, to help us market through direct mail, events, and other university-focused promotion.

Long-term plans call for the company to develop further manifestations of its answer to our brand promise of “helping people take better notes”. We plan to integrate into the Salesforce.com ecosystem as well as generate other features of specific value to large enterprises.

We also plan to make PeopleMath, the social network which uses the MetaNotes interface paradigm, into a powerful brand within the current Internet generation. Finally, we are prepared to challenge eBay and Craigslist as the best way for small sellers and local services to create demand and find customers. The firm would then be an excellent candidate for acquisition by a large Internet company or an IPO to compete against its more entrenched competitors in these large markets.

We will strategically shape our user adoption to cross what we see as a “Web 2.0 chasm” that separates early adopters of such a service is from the teeming masses that have adopted certain of these services and brought a household-name status to brands such as Myspace. The anticipate great interest in our service from the usual suspects of Web 2.0 adoption: bloggers looking for new platforms from which to express themselves and advertisers hungry to be seen as cutting edge. However, taking a page from Facebook, we will aggressively target students as a segment. The advantages of our targeting students include:

• students need to take notes, and MetaNotes is a perfect and unique solution for notetakers that fills an important void
• students like to collaborate, and MetaNotes allows multiple students to take notes on the same book or course in a fair and easily understood framework in comparison with current solutions, such as the wiki
• students love to share information and files with one another, including:
  • YouTube videos
  • social networking profiles
  • images and text from the Internet
  • notes about classes and projects
• students are a great initial segment for viral marketing
• students can easily be targeted with MetaNotes promotional budget through PR, endorsements, and targeted advertising such as posted handbills, advertising in student newspapers and partnerships with other companies that target students effectively

• Make us a ton of money.
• Become THE STANDARD way of e-thinking.
• Help people think.
  • Beginning with us.
• Be simple to market.
  • Obvious user value.
  • Everyone should use this.
  • Marketing baked into the product.
• Grow naturally and virally.
• Invade the “Enterprise Collaboration” market in one year.

How do people take notes today? Over the course of the last two years I are team has witnessed and experimented with a wide variety of solutions for the eternal problem of how best to digest the torrent of information involved in the achievement of the Master of business administration degree at a top school. Almost every student, including ourselves, relies primarily on off-line notetaking systems. These systems are often simply notes written on paper in a linear or bulletpoint format; some notes are taken in the margins of textbooks, and other notes are taken into a software applications such as Microsoft Word. Finally, a solution for mobile “idea people” emerged in the early 1990s in the form of the PDA, or personal digital assistant. As epitomized by Palm and its flagship PalmPilot, notes can be entered into mobile devices through handwriting recognition software and then be transferred to a desktop computer.

Two recent innovations in notetaking are pertinent to our model. The first of these is “mindmapping”, and the second is the wiki. Mindmapping, as epitomized by the excellent software MindManager Pro by Mindjet, Inc., allows notetakers a variety of options that enable graphical comprehension of complex concepts. In essence, mindmapping involves jotting down summaries of information and linking these summaries to other summaries. The net effect of a complete in mind map is an overview of a complex subject that then can be drilled down through conversation or footnoting. This paradigm of information and creation allows for a holistic approach towards document creation and brainstorming; the user can create top-level outlines and easily elaborate on these lighter topics over time, leaping from subject to subject effortlessly in contrast with having to scroll up and down a document seeking the perfect insertion point for a new idea. The wiki, for its part, represents is a framework for online notetaking that is quite impressive. As epitomized by Wikipedia and the easy-to-use wiki platform PBwiki, creators and contributors to wiki’s can collaborate in the gathering of information on any topic imaginable. The wiki, however, is fundamentally an extension of a blog; however, its structure is meant to enable effortless linking between distinct documents. To some degree, MetaNotes is a merger of these two concepts with some unique new features included. If one thinks of an individual MetaNotes as a “document”, our platform lets users move around and visually map MetaNotes with one another, as well as letting them create new documents in a way that is far more compelling and even simpler than the wiki. We anticipate that we can’t eclipse these projects, incorporating their best features into our product roadmap over time and perhaps engaging in business development with Mindjet (who see compatibility is key to their marketing strategy).

• competitive information, especially regarding business model innovations
• surveys and other research about target customers
• industry information, statistics, data, segments, positions, roles played by various competitors and entities
• marketing brochures and other marketing materials
• any past internal company planning papers
• past tax returns for existing companies
• organizational charts
• charts depicting operational procedures
• product data sheets

As users become more intimate with their MetaNotes accounts, they will enter information that they will be needing to access regularly. It is highly unlikely that a user that has begun to familiarize themselves with our constantly deepening functionality will invest time and effort transferring that information into any competing Web 2.0 organizations scheme. Furthermore, we plan on integrating with as many other services as possible and keeping a keen eye on the competitive radar to ensure that our application continues to set the standard for online notetaking capabilities.

We believe in the power of the MBA degree to signal a clear difference.

• Hire out of Kenan-Flagler.
• Hire away from RTP tech crowd.
  • We are hungry for Ruby on Rails coders.
• Use Craigslist.
• Make sure each key business function has an MBA on it.
• Retain employees fanatically.
  • Amazing corporate culture and work freedom.
  • North Carolina location is less susceptible to poaching.

• business plan
• value proposition
  • rhetoric, imagery
• brand
  • brand promise
  • brand elements
• my own freedom
  • a place to live
  • some cash
• legal support
  • merrill + smith/anderson
    • terms of service
  • intellectual property
  • funding assistance
• bookkeeping
• server and bandwidth
• marketing
  • students
  • public relations
• surprise
• a sales force to attract sponsors
• coding
• good karma

• Prototype Includes testing and feedback.
  • Requirements – determination of the strategy behind launching a beta and what is needed to achieve the goals outlined.
  • Beta Specification contains everything needed for beta launch.
  • Product Roadmap contains everything we will implement after the
• Brand. Creation and finalization of brand and strategy, including value propositions.
• Segment Analysis. Selection and creation of promotional plans for each segment, as well as sequencing and budgeting.
• Incorporation
• Beta coded
• Beta launch
• First PR
• First revenue realized
• Initial funding
  • Initial hiring
  • Creation of headquarters
• User growth
  • 5000 users (beta)
  • 100,000 users (first full release)
  • 6m users (facebook’s numbers)
• Exit or IPO

Half the small businesses in America, and 70 percent of one-person businesses, don’t even have Web sites. Obviously, the percentage that exploits Internet marketing tools like e-mail newsletters, search engine ads and online stores is even lower.

Suppose you’re among them. Suppose you train dogs, or translate documents, or retouch photos, or sell knickknacks on eBay, or make seashell jewelry. And right now, your idea of a marketing plan is taping up fliers in the grocery store.

How are you supposed to get a Web site? Who will design it, and who will host it? Who do you pay to place search engine ads for you, and how will you know if they’re working? How do you send out e-mail newsletters without being blocked as a spammer? And how will you know if that effort is paying off?

And above all: how much is all this going to cost you?

Landing pages have become the Omega-3’s of Web marketing: If you’re not using them and optimizing them ad infinitum, you’re squandering your online ad dollars. Or so the landing page optimization crowd would have you believe.

Like most good ideas that get hyped into panaceas, landing pages have grown larger than life, overshadowing the real source of value—a respondent’s holistic landing experience.

In the spirit of probing the pros and cons of this popular post-click marketing format—and, okay, doing a little tongue-in-cheek myth busting—we offer our take of the top 5 best and worst things about landing pages, in contrast to multi-page landing paths.

(Just to clarify terminology: Every landing experience obviously begins with a page, where respondents land after clicking an ad or email link. But the term “landing page” specifically refers to a one-page post-click marketing format, where the entirety of a campaign’s pitch is squeezed onto that one page.)

The top 5 best things, real or imagined, about landing pages:

• Landing pages are quick and cheap. That’s not a putdown—fast, inexpensive experimentation is very important in this landscape of a thousand niche marketing opportunities. But “cheap” should be measured by CPA (cost per acquisition), not absolute dollars. If you spend twice as much time on a three-page landing path, but it generates a 5-times factor in your conversion rate on the same ad dollars, that’s a good investment.
• Landing pages can be “matched” with advertisements. Huge benefit! (Although not everyone using landing pages takes advantage of it.) Arguably the power of message match, where content a respondent sees post-click is tailored to the promise of the specific ad they clicked on, is the primary reason why landing pages have improved conversion rates. This principle is a keeper for any good landing experience.
• Landing pages can be tested and optimized. Absolutely: test, test, test. One of the problems with big Web sites is that they suffer from inertia. Online direct marketing campaigns thrive on rapid experimentation, and landing pages have enabled that… to a point. You can experiment only so much within the box of one page (“let’s try every color in the Web palette as our background!”).
• Landing pages are easy to manage. Maybe. One page may be easy to manage, but many, many different “one page” variations are not. You’ve no doubt run across a lot of outdated or link-broken landing pages. As you scale up to running dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of targeted landing experiences of any kind, the content management challenge is daunting. Good software and processes can make this manageable, but that’s not an exclusive feature to the landing page format, and by no means a given.
• Landing pages are friendly for respondents. Well…. message match is friendly, to be sure. But there are three cases of how a one-page format can be used:
  • A simple but compelling idea, applicable to all respondents, is well presented on one short page.
  • A more complex idea with different benefits for different respondents is all jammed onto one long, crowded page shoved at everyone indiscriminately, leaving respondents confused or overwhelmed.
  • A more complex idea with different benefits for different respondents is artificially edited down to one short page—but loses fidelity and becomes less compelling.
• The dream of friendly landing pages for respondents is only materialized in case 1, but there are a heck of a lot of direct marketing campaigns that don’t fit that mold that end up being shortchanged as landing pages in cases 2 or 3. Trying to squeeze a Labrador Retriever into a Chihuahua’s carrying crate is just not pretty.

• Sagging Page Syndrome (SPS), also known as “the kitchen sink.” Some things in life really are so simple that one short page sums it up nicely for everyone. But for the far majority of products and services in the world, there’s more to it.
  • Trying to cram as much as possible onto one page puts the burden on the respondent to sift through it. Unfortunately, most of the time, they’re just not that into you yet.
  • If you’ve got that much to say, and it’s valuable, then break it into digestible chunks across a multi-page path, ideally in a way that lets respondents choose which chunks are most relevant to them.
• Rushing for the close. Landing pages that immediately present the respondent with a form to fill out—to subscribe, get a download, request more information, etc.— often reach out too far too fast.
  • A respondent clicked on your ad by expressing a modicum of interest, a willingness to consider what you have to say. If you immediately demand a commitment with their name, email address, or more, it’s like strolling into a store and having a salesperson instantly thrust a purchase order in your hands. Not surprisingly, this approach has a low conversion rate.
  • Good post-click marketing should build trust with a step or two of a “conversation” before popping the question, as any good salesperson would.
• No segmentation — clicks are treated as a commodity. Not all clicks are created equal. Ad response traffic often contains a spectrum of different audience segments. They clicked on the same ad, yes, but not all for the same reason, not all with the same needs.
  • The one-page format of landing pages makes the same pitch to all of them, oblivious to their distinctions. If the page focuses only on one segment, it disenfranchises others; if it tries to speak to all segments at once, its passion and relevance to any one segment are watered down.
  • A better approach is to use a landing path where the first page induces a one-click directed behavioral segmentation choice from respondents—a branch in the path depending on the segment the respondent selects—and then you can speak with conviction and authority to each segment’s specific interests on page two.
• Optimizing the deck chairs on the Titanic. Landing page optimization is not unlike Henry Ford’s original production line: You can do any optimization you want, as long as it’s on this one page. Hey, we’re fine with testing which combination of headline, image, and offer button works best, but you can waste a lot of time on minutia (“does this work better with a comma or a semicolon?”).
  • Instead, you should be testing much more important elements of your campaign—such as your audience segmentation and the sequence of your pitch.
  • With so many niche marketing opportunities out there competing for your attention, you need the big hits far more than the microscopic tweaks.
• Giving bad brand. Collectively, all of the problems above contribute to making landing pages bad branding experiences. As noted earlier, landing pages are quick and cheap—which is good—but they often look quick and cheap, which is not good. Not good at all. Because it signals quick and cheap for your brand, and unless you’re the Dollar Store, that’s not a good image to put in people’s minds.
  • A landing experience should look and feel and behave so as to signal two important things: (a) you care about the impressions of that respondent who just clicked, and (b) they can be assured that you take pride in everything your organization does.
  • If you need more than one computer-assembled page to send the right signals, it’s worth it.

The good news is that fixing these problems in post-click marketing really isn’t that hard. Stop thinking at the page level, start thinking at the path level. Leverage audience segmentation. And remember that your brand never gets a second chance to make a first impression.

• Become as ubiquitous as email.
  • Become like the next Microsoft Word.
• Become the most popular homepage on the Internet.
  • Become the biggest social network.
• Monetize right out the gate – no dilly-dallying on monetization.
  • Massive, eternal revenue streams.
• Change the way humanity takes notes.
  • Change the way humanity thinks and remembers.
• Own the MetaNotes platform, and direct all other players on how they can earn from it.
• Pre-empt all competition before it even emerges.
  • Intellectual property.
  • Brand.
  • Impossible to imitate without seeming pathetic.

Target Customer Characteristics

As an Internet startup with limited funds, we must focus our marketing investment. We have segmented our potential userbase along usage lines, and we have determined that STUDENTS in college and graduate schools all over the world will be fervent adopters of the MetaNotes platform if we target them correctly and achieve the position in their minds of: “this is the best way to take notes ever”.

• Our team have campus connections with a key school, the University of North Carolina, and can test-market to Tar Heels before going national with campaigns
• Easy to target with media, pitch, and word of mouth
• Our brand “attitude” will be congruent with the desire of college students to break free of “legacy” models of learning
• High perceived need for “an amazing notetaking system that will help you pass”
• High influence and interaction with other key segments, such as high school students, parents, academics and industry
• University students are proven online trendsetters, as evidenced by the growth of Facebook
• Student internship programs are a well-respected form of campus marketing that would allow us to provide “rich evangelism” to potential new users (other students)
• There is no compulsory or dominant note-taking system online, resulting in many students barely taking notes at all (and barely passing as a result)
• There is no widely adopted way of collaborating in teams in real-time; nobody uses wikis, and student teams generally forward emails around to one another, with resultant chronic problems with versioning and delivery
• MetaNotes may find favor with professors and administrators, who would be powerful sources of testimonials and even enterprise contracts.

We suspect that male and female students have distinct studying and note-taking habits in aggregate, and we are conducting marketing research via Facebook to determine whether to slant our marketing along gender lines in order to better reach the right students with our message.

Location

Students are located all over the world; we plan to focus on the North American university student population, which is distributed similarly to the general US population but clustered in “college towns”, from big cities like Boston, MA to smaller “hip” cities such as Ann Arbor, MI and Austin, TX. These populations can be reached through the Internet sites Facebook and Myspace, through ads in their campus newspapers and “alternative weeklies”, through flyering campaigns as provided by The Poster Guys LLC in the Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Durham area, or through a mobilized network of campus interns. They also tend to read culture-themed magazines such as Spin and Blender.

Market Research

• general needs of students, in order to better target introduction sequences
• awareness of MetaNotes and other Web 2.0 and “productivity solution” brands, as well as avenues for driving student interest (unearthing influencers etc.)
• interest in new note-taking solutions, and how interest patterns emerge (and can be driven) and spread across groups (through observation, imitation, invite etc.)
• desire for learning and new tools for remembering and taking notes
• willingness to pay for features and upgrades
• understanding of the MetaNotes brand, documentation, new features etc.

• user satisfaction (with each feature)
• usability testing
• feature development
• multi-platform testing
• documentation testing
• brand appeal

• OrderMotion, a hosted CRM solution that lets us capture customer information (for subscribers), send direct mail and email campaigns punctually, and maintain a database of customer profiles and purchase history (key for the Marketplace milestone)
• SurveyMonkey, a hosted survey system which lets MetaNotes conduct unlimited surveys of our userbase; we can offer coupons as an incentive for survey completion
• Facebook, which offers affordable market research polling of its audience which can be targeted by campus

• % aware of MetaNotes
• % who know what MetaNotes does
• % who have seen MetaNotes
• % who have created a MetaNotes account
• % who use MetaNotes frequently
• % who recommend MetaNotes to others

• How much money college students spend on school supplies
• How many college students are in various disciplines, are from different race or ethnic groups, have various cultural interests etc.
• How many college students pay for online services, how much they pay etc.

According to college promotion specialist Alloy Marketing, college students command $200bn in spending power each year. (cited from http://www.alloymarketing.com/media/college/index.html)

Customer Motivations And Purchasing Patterns

With students, the decision to involve oneself with an online tool has been shown to be best triggered through viral adoption. For instance, with Myspace and Facebook, individuals invited friends to adopt the platform too so they could be “linked up”. Another best practice from both sites is lock-in through data entry. As users develop and “trick out” their profiles and friend lists, usage increases and aversion to loss of one’s account skyrockets.

MetaNotes is optimized for both of these best practices. The chance to “pass someone a note” is a perfect play on schoolhouse fun, and the prospect of working together on digesting a large textbook for the big paper or test is a chance few

On the other hand, “willingness to pay” for students may be quite low as students are pretty much broke. Some students may upgrade for a tiny fee or give each other virtual gifts if the motivation is right, but it is possible that the student segment may wind up more valuable as a source of attention that MetaNotes can sell to advertisers and sponsors than a revenue source in its own right. For instance, popular Web 2.0 services such as Myspace, YouTube and Facebook are provided free of charge to users, with the result that both services chronically struggle with achieving profitability despite their massive userbases. Both firms’ market value is derived largely from their strategic value as avenues of access to very valuable consumer groups. It is possible that only services with direct replacement value such as Skype (which eliminates the need for a land line) can find college audiences that are willing to pay. It is possible to build a decent revenue stream on CPC advertising (especially through interstitials, as supplied by AdBrite) through the college segment marketing phase of our business until we work out the kinks in our first five business model initiatives: Subscriptions, Virtual Goods, the Marketplace, our HotorNot analogue and Video Push Ads.

Students who spend their time online view themselves as responsible and professional. We believe that through targeting our promotional investment on online venues such as Facebook and Myspace, we will conserve scarce marketing resources and effectively target the more “cyber” portion of the college student market. We also want to promote through the university administration and faculty, and will develop pitches and an approach strategy through our Business Development manager, Emery Dora.

The MetaNotes Corporation is an Internet business that plans to launch a series of websites based on a core platform technology that creates a user interface resembling post it notes on a broad, Microsoft Excel-like scrollable screen. This application lets users easily take notes on their own ideas, collaborate with virtual teams, and make clippings of Internet content they may encounter, including images and YouTube videos. Our application constitutes a breakthrough new category for the “Web 2.0/software-as-a-service” sub-industry. Web 2.0 services enable users to perform application-like tasks that used to be handled by software applications resident on a user’s hard drive. MetaNotes is simply the best way to take notes available online, and as such we anticipate great interest in our service as soon as we launch the beta. Unlike wikis, MetaNotes is designed for rapid adoption and optimized for integration with a users’ current browsing behavior. The easy interface, simple and compelling design paradigm, compatibility with existing models of notetaking and social networking, and resonance with our firms mission, brand, and tone of communications will make MetaNotes a great friend of its users and a valuable destination for advertising dollars.

• mindmapping/mindjet
• franklin planner
• palmpilot
• moleskine
• microsoft outlook
• google spreadsheet
• google notebook
• stickies (mac software)
• post-it notes (3m)
• de.licio.us
• stikkit
• wikis *

In order to market MetaNotes to students, we will contract with Alloy Marketing (alloymarketing.com), a promotion company with expertise and connections in the student market. Alloy will distribute flyers via its network of campus representatives for launch, and if we are able to secure financing we will work with Alloy to engage students via direct mail and email blast when new features are launched.

We will also create a student intern program to recruit and train evangelists on campus who could show campus groups and individuals how to use MetaNotes as a tool for their notetaking needs.

• Visualize your audiences.
• Divide the Summary into paragraphs that mirror the sections of your business plan.
• Keep each topic brief.
• Use bullets.
• Include a small chart or graph that illustrates an important point.
• Use white space and informative subheads to break up text blocks and make the pages seem less intimidating.

These are the associations that we want linked to MetaNotes to the exclusion of our competition and substitutes:

• immediately obvious to start using
• stop using Notepad or Stickies
• personal productivity online
• pay-per-action made simple
• take better notes with MetaNotes
• a wiki for the rest of us
• “look-and-feel” components of our layout and design
  • draggable, resizable, etc.
  • the vast playing field
  • multiple worksheets within an account
• memory: the best way to remember your ideas and information you collect online
• images and video: the best way to structure a presentation
• publishing: a brand-new way to blog; a repository of eternal content
• made by students for students

The Company

MetaNotes, Incorporated, a Delaware Corporation based in North Carolina, provides a Web 2.0 note-taking tool to students, entrepreneurs, and others who rely on taking notes and want to do so online. MetaNotes meets three core needs for our users:

• taking notes (and reviewing the same)
• setting goals and tracking them over time
• collaborating in a “notes network” (including community and commerce)

The Web 2.0 segment of the Internet industry is characterized by great branding, wild leaps in user value and involvement, and a superheated acquisition environment in which startups barely a year old are acquired for billions. MetaNotes intends to capitalize on that growth. The company’s stock is currently held by President and CEO Srini Kumar (based in Durham NC), with an assignation of work pending in exchange for equity with the primary coder, CTO John Beppu (based in Los Angeles, CA).

Products And Services

The company has created a platform for “note-taking” using an interface that looks like “Post-It Notes” and sprawls invitingly across an Excel-like scrolling workspace. Many MetaNotes are visible on one “worksheet”; an account can contain multiple worksheets (we may charge past a certain number). Our distinctive interface style is recognizable from twenty feet away on a standard laptop screen. This gives the user a unique overview of many ideas in one glance, and the ability to rearrange notes at will makes MetaNotes an ideal outlining tool. MetaNotes can contain text, images, video or audio, and can be dragged and resized magically using proprietary technology. We will sell upgraded features to accounts, creating Basic (free), Gold, Platinum and Enterprise editions of the core software at tiered monthly (or yearly at a discount) subscription pricing. A MetaNotes account is simple to get started to use, but incredibly involving, much as a Microsoft Office application might be – but with a “social networking” and (eventually) an eBay/Amazon/HotorNot twist through which our users will buy and sell real and “virtual” goods. The prototype is currently hosted on a prototype site, which will be transferred to MetaNotes.com before launch. We estimate that approximately one week of coding and testing by the founders in person will bring the MetaNotes prototype to beta release. In addition, “implementations” of the MetaNotes interface technology will be created to provide specialized vertical social networks either on subdomains from MetaNotes.com or on other domains such as PeopleMath.com. These vertical networks will each be centered around a targeted business model, such as auctions, online dating, business planning, or travel, and will attract deeply segmented audiences for which our firm will staff up with topic experts. Key to our planning process is the uncertainty of what within our product is patentable; if we are able to secure and defend look and feel patents, for instance, we may be able to create many different business models to make the most of the Internet traffic our properties will generate.

Target Market

MetaNotes will be of particular interest to students and others whose vocation demands regular notetaking and review. Other segments that are of value to us will include the Web 2.0 interest community, entrepreneurs, small businesses, professionals, people interested in planning and personal productivity innovations (such as mindmapping), and general audiences who simply want a place to jot things down that isn’t as complicated as a wiki or will be attracted by our social network and marketplace features. Additional segments will be interested as we drive towards compatibility with other note systems, such as the PalmPilot, Microsoft Outlook, Stikkit and Microsoft Word, helping them switch effortlessly to the MetaNotes platform.

The Competition

People who want to take notes have three options:

• Use MetaNotes or one of our direct Web 2.0 competitors
• Use a software application to take notes onto one’s hard drive
• Use an offline solution, such as a planner or a notebook

The first of these options is superior because of the basic Web 2.0 value propositions of universal access through a Web browser, the opportunity for collaboration, speed of data entry, searchability, tagging etc. Very few of the current crop of Web 2.0 projects aspire to help users “take better notes”. Our competition in Web 2.0 includes:

• bubbl.us – a Flash-driven mind-mapping tool
• Stikkit.com – basically a “personal-productivity” focused wiki application with some cool data entry models
• de.licio.us – not really a note-taking application, but a way to “collect and annotate” web pages
• wikis, such as PBWiki – a complicated mega-blog that allows any user to edit
• Google Notebook and Google Docs – search saving tool and online word processor/spreadsheets
• WebNote, an open source project that bears some serious similarities with MetaNotes Additional competition can be considered if one looks at our business models:
• HotOrNot.com also sells “virtual flowers”, as we plan to do within our PeopleMath portal
• eBay and its subsidiaries PayPal and Craigslist allow easy e-commerce, marketing and payment processing for a “long tail” of sellers – our Marketplace represents direct competition with eBay and Craigslist, and we may consider our own proprietary currency system in the future
• Google and Microsoft are geared up to battle for online “Office” application supremacy; MetaNotes is a better solution than either company is likely to provide, given our breakthrough interface design.

In the software space, where more complicated operations can be conducted resident on a user’s hard drive, the variety of note-taking applications is more robust, but there is no dominant solution:

• Mindjet MindManager Pro – the best of the “mindmapping” solutions
• Apple’s Stickies, the closest to our interface, only available to users of the Mac platform
• Windows-platform Stickies imitators like Crawler Notes and 3M’s Post-It Note Software
• Microsoft’s OneNote, probably the best thought out note-taking solution, optimized for notebook computers
• Palm Desktop and the PalmPilot – basic note, calendar, and contact management software; high market share
  • Also, the Blackberry
• Microsoft Outlook – scheduling software with rudimentary notetaking
• Notepad and Word – rudimentary solutions but largest installed base; not a “multi-note workspace”

The “competition” with the largest market share is offline, or paper, note-taking systems. These include:

• The Franklin Planner, DayRunner, and other planning systems
• Filing systems with hanging folders containing manila folders
• High-end notebooks such as Moleskine
• Commodity notebooks such as those provided by the Mead Corporation of Dayton OH
• Loose paper (plain or three-hole punched)
• 3M’s Post-It Notes

Complementing these paper products is a range of pens, notably:

• Sharpie
• Cross – the professional’s choice

MetaNotes maintains the following advantages over these types of competitors:

• Fun, awesome interface; intuitive and easy to get started
• Integrated social networking and (soon) e-commerce and voting
• Share your notes with teams or a public community
• Notes can contain images and video (make a video mixtape)
• Infinite scrolling and multiple worksheets make this resemble an Office application
• Searchable
• Notes will be able to contain RSS feeds, Facebook profiles, playlists, and widgets such as are created by Slide and Photobucket
• (Soon) collect content from all over the web through a “right-click” data entry model; also Stikkit, Pageflakes, and Twitter API’s

Marketing And Sales Strategy

We will position MetaNotes as the best place to take notes on anything, and will use the slogan Take Better Notes With MetaNotes to drive home this value. We will target students through strategic PR to underline the academic origins of this project, through a clever internship program, through contests and through free premium accounts for currently enrolled students.

We will staff our marketing operation according to five key tasks:

• Getting a critical mass of users
• Getting users to use MetaNotes all the time
• Getting users to spend money on upgrades and virtual goods
• Getting sponsors to fund promotions or research initiatives
• Developing additional business models based on forecasted participation and partnerships

We will also quickly adapt MetaNotes to the API for the Twitter service in order to launch PeopleMath, our “social networking hub” where users can make “collections of cool people” through a MetaNotes interface. This will be a robust platform for sales of virtual gifts, such as virtual flowers from men to women. Finally, we will cultivate an ecosystem of partners and power-users who will assist us in evangelism and training in the MetaNotes service; this will begin as a college internship program.

Viral marketing and email marketing will be key elements to attract new users and keep them coming back. Groups will bring more new individuals on board for team planning purposes; usage will spawn more usage as people re-apply their MetaNotes accounts. The goal of our usage strategy is to earn a position as our users’ “home page”, dethroning Yahoo! and other content and search providers.

As we integrate more and more data entry types (such as Microsoft Word) into our model, we believe the user groups for these data types will be very attracted to MetaNotes as an alternative way to keep their existing documents up-to-date and share them with others.

Operations

In order to deliver on its brand promise and innovation potential, the MetaNotes Corporation must dispatch the following activities:

• Planning – value proposition, branding, segmentation
• Prototyping – creating the model of the future application, including all help and wizard screens
• Corporate Structure – legal structure, representation, bookkeeping, financial management, banking, tax compliance
• Fundraising –
• Market Research – finding out how people are going to use MetaNotes; developing value propositions, marketing tactics, brand testing, and feature or vertical portal ideas
• Specifications – turning the raw vision for the product and market research into directives for coding
• Coding – turning specifications into testable code
• Testing and Feedback – making sure everything works; soliciting, evaluating and integrating input from beta testers, market research on students, and early adopters
• Research and Development – including future compatibility with coming multi-touch and 3D operating systems, integration into One Laptop Per Child, offline/online syncing, new file upload and data entry options etc.
• System Administration – server space and bandwidth – especially if we begin hosting images or video ourselves, or grow explosively
• Community management – creating a “community of trust” for our Marketplace model, similar to eBay
• Support and documentation – video, introduction sequence notes, help, FAQ, community, tips and tricks
• Sales – converting users into subscribers; converting sponsorship interest into advertising contracts
• Marketing Operations – public relations, material distribution
• Partnership – building users, user value, and revenue streams by adapting others’ products or marketing needs to the MetaNotes platform
  • approaching, negotiating, signing and maintaining agreements
  • building a coalition or ecosystem to bolster our support as an independent Web 2.0 property
  • provide the whole product

Management

President and Founder Srini Kumar is an MBA from the University of North Carolina and a BA in Sociology from Stanford University. Bringing over ten years of Internet entrepreneurial experience to the MetaNotes Corporation, he is the founder of StickerNation.com, a custom vinyl sticker printing operation that has since 2001 provided small batches of promotional stickers to thousands of Internet customers. CTO and Founder John Beppu is a Ruby On Rails and DHTML wizard who has recently left Shopzilla.com to take on an engineering position at Los Angeles startup Geni.com, a Web 2.0 genealogy tool. The two founders are a synergistic team that is able to conceive and execute user-driven product strategies in stealth. Additionally, should this business acquire either a large enough revenue stream to expand or angel or venture funding, four fellow MBA graduates from UNC are prepared to enter the firm to oversee Operations, Business Development, Marketing and Product Management (Matthew Madsen, Emery Dora, Ron Wen and Ron Clabo). This management team is confident that they can lead Web 2.0 into a new era of usefulness as well as maximize the return our firm realizes from its innovation.

Development

A prototype has been developed which is in heavy use by the founding team as lead users. It is hosted at http://metanotes.lbox.org and at least fifty separate pages have been created to showcase various use cases for different information creation, gathering and retrieval purposes. The next phase of development is the creation of the beta specification, which will tier various features as “basic”, “premium”, “infinite” and “enterprise”, build in several revenue generation models and convey to the coders the user experience requirements and usage flows. Soon after that, we plan to launch our beta edition at DefCon, a conference for “hackers” held each year in Las Vegas at the beginning of August. A detailed product roadmap is being developed to help us plug the various features into a logical release schedule. In the future, MetaNotes will make investment in coders and system administration a top corporate and financial priority.

Financials

The financial strategy of MetaNotes is simple:

• Attract as many free users as possible
  • Clever promotion
  • Public relations
  • Targeted marketing for students during “back to school” 2007
• Empower these users to get other users onboard
• Bring these users back to the site via permission-based email 2) Create a business model.
• Figure out a way to convert the traffic into dollars.
  • Subscription model.
  • Virtual goods.
  • Usage model.
• Figure out goods that may be purchased all the time by our users. 3) Convert the traffic into revenue at increasing rates.
• Create an attractive pricing model chock-full of value-added features that will convert free users to paid users.
• Attract sponsors and advertisers without sharing it unduly with ad networks and giving these sponsors many options.

Annual projections for MetaNotes.com are difficult to project due to impossible to control factors relating to our success in launch and within the student segment. The financials section of this document therefore creates projections along several different “cases” of user adoption and growth. Conformity with the strategies outlined in this plan will maximize the likelihood of the optimal user (and financial) case.

Funds Sought And Uses

The company is currently seeking $500,000 in investment financing. These funds will be used to hire our founders and build additional features into the product, especially revenue-generating community areas such as the MetaNotes Marketplace. Furthermore this investment will enable us to properly promote MetaNotes to students, a large enough segment to warrant marketing focus to promote our product and brand as the best place to take notes ever invented. Long-term plans call for the company to develop further manifestations of its answer to our brand promise of “helping people take better notes”. We plan to integrate into the Salesforce.com ecosystem as well as generate other features of specific value to large enterprises. We also plan to make PeopleMath, the social network which uses the MetaNotes interface paradigm, into a powerful brand within the current Internet generation. Finally, we are prepared to challenge eBay and Craigslist as the best way for small sellers and local services to create demand and find customers. The firm would then be an excellent candidate for acquisition by a large Internet company or an IPO to compete against its more entrenched competitors in these large markets.

1. Sheer amount of links to the site.
2. A collection of particular pages, sections of a site, possibly seen as important.
3. Linking to other well respected sites, not neccessarily authority sites but ones heading that way.
4. Possibly domain age?

• MetaNotes will look different from other websites
  • From twenty feet away the screen is recognizable
• The MetaNotes home page will be a display of the product, not just a description of the benefits
• We will challenge our user base to invent video advertising (via a contest)
• People will have specifically constructed memes with which to talk about their MetaNotes experience in such a way as to entice other conversation participants to try it
• How is a website “packaged”? What are the elements?
  • Homepage – jump right in energy
    • a “public notespace” without deleting and with auto-repositioning would be ideal
  • Brand – we will be the word thought of first when “note-taking” comes up; the moleskine of the Web
  • Imagery – we will use a lot of “mindmap” type information design when describing MetaNotes
  • Words – we will use a hip, omniscient tone when writing about MetaNotes
  • Overall design aesthetic

• how do we want MetaNotes to be seen by students?
  • usage positioning – “MetaNotes is the website to use when you want to take notes that you want to use later.”
  • personal positioning – “MetaNotes is what hip, online and smart students use to take notes.”
  • social positioning – “MetaNotes is the choice of the Web 2.0 generation, and using it together this generation is creating a content space that will reach far beyond Wikipedia.”
  • product positioning – “MetaNotes will be easy, cool, networked and fun to use.”

Data entry is the holy grail of Web 2.0. The information entered into these platforms is a key driver of their value. Users who enter information that is frequently accessed by others can in the aggregate create sites like Wikipedia with dominate their off-line ancestor’s (such as the Encyclopedia Britannica). However, where he is the repository for information that is primarily of use to oneself? Where is the classic” white board” that would be of great use to virtual teams large and small? We believe that MetaNotes is this solution, and therefore will aggregate a massive data that will confer the following benefits to our firm:

• barriers to switching, derived from the typical user’s distaste for reentering information
• value to publishers, as they can create MetaNotes pages as a new form of blogging
• value to advertisers placing contextual links on our site, who will find their ads supremely targeted and realize high ROI
• value to users, who will customize their MetaNotes accounts to their hearts content and learn to take notes and remember their important information in a brand-new and effective way
• value to groups, who will engage in team research and brainstorming dynamically rather than forwarding around e-mail attachments of Word and PowerPoint documents
• value to audiences, as publishers create MetaNotes pages on all kinds of subjects and use our community building applications to create subcommunities where audiences can interact with one another
• value to our product development process, as we will continue to map our users demands on to our platform
• value to our bottom line, as more data entered will drive increased traffic, greater usage, greater user loyalty, and more product development options to improve monetization such as The MetaNotes Marketplace.

In general, many Web 2.0 startups have created products which involve the entering of information by users. One moniker given to this new suite of applications is the “read/write Web”. For instance, Hotmail, the first shot in the Web 2.0 Revolution, is a tool into which users enter information and receive information from others. Blogger, the next proto—Web 2.0 application, gave its users a way to enter information and have it posted online. Much of the value of Web 2.0 superstar applications such as Flickr, Digg and Myspace comes from a robust user community constantly entering and improving data streams aggregated by these platforms. MetaNotes is a classic read/write Web application.

• create videos with cute girls demonstrating how to use the various features
• code the interface so that all the different features are very easy and even fun to use
• integrate with other platforms they are using (twitter, ipod/iphone/cellphone, text messaging)
• make writing written notes into one’s MetaNotes account a snap by creating a downloadable PDF “satellite” MetaNotes that people can print out and then later enter into their MetaNotes account (also maybe by selling tangible post-it note related products)
• get celebrities to use MetaNotes
• get product placement in movies and on TV
• get positive PR about how it’s a new Web tool people should try out

• The price of our basic service will always be zero.
  • There will never be a barrier to entry-level usage on account of price.
• We need to balance the price of our service with the users’ willingness to pay.
  • We should poll our earlier users to discover new willingness to pay.
• The free accounts will allow up to x worksheets (say five).
• We will price additional sheets at, say, $1 apiece.
• We want people paying us more as they become powerusers.
• We also want people trivially adding sheets so they’ll use it more.
• We don’t want anyone going “this is a ripoff” when it’s time for them to buy another sheet.
  • They can just go start another account if they’re that pissed – we could use the usercount.
• There are big benefits to linking your metanotes pages though.
• Have to think this through completely.

• What are the strategic elements of MetaNotes?
  • Simple paradigm for note-taking
  • Easy to understand and get started
  • Easy to use
  • Addicting – fun to take notes
  • Immediate lock-in and obvious network effects
  • Immediately saved and inherently available
  • Viral element of collaboration and sharing
  • Multimedia elements
• What does the brand “MetaNotes” describe?
  • A way to see many chunks of information on a page
  • A way to create a scrapbook of Web and self-generated content
  • Somewhere to copy-paste everything

• increase a person’s knowledge
• to prepare a formal document
• to write up the meetings of a meeting to give to others
• to gather information for balanced decisionmaking, such as what stance to take towards a new theory
• to have a general record of what was discussed
• to keep as private notes for later unforeseen reference
• to be able to communicate or advise other people using the notes as a basis