Populace ads business plan v1.5 (winner QRCE 3rd BP Competition 2009)

Populace Ads “Online Ad-Campaigns for Small Business”

Business Plan for
Populace Ads:
One Stop Online Publicity
for Small & Medium Businesses
“To Democratize Online Advertising”

Muhammad Arrabi
arrabi@gmail.com
Santa Clara, CA
(425) 591-3734

Version: 0.4
Last Update: 11/16/2008 2:45 AM

The components of this business plan have been submitted on a confidential basis. It cannot be reproduced,
stored, or copied in any form without permission from the author. Do not copy, fax, reproduce, or distribute
without permission.

1


Revisions History
Date Author Note
Oct 12, 2008 Muhammad Doc created. company description and competitive advantage.
Oct 16, 2008 Muhammad Full first draft: ,marketing, plans, competitors
Oct 17, 2008 Muhammad Initial financial plan
Oct 24, 2008 Muhammad Minor fixes.
Nov 16, 2008 Muhammad Incorporated feedback from competition, rewrote execution plan. New
financial plan.

2


Table of Contents

1 Executive Summary .................................................................................................... 4
1.1 The Opportunity ................................................................................................... 4
1.2 The Need: seed money ......................................................................................... 4
1.3 The Forecast ......................................................................................................... 5
Market Analysis .................................................................................................................. 6
1.4 The Industry: Online Advertisement .................................................................... 6
1.4.1 Size and Growth ............................................................................................ 6
1.4.2 The Industry Structure .................................................................................. 6
1.5 Target Segment: Small and Medium Businesses ................................................. 7
1.6 Further Details on Ad Agencies ........................................................................... 8
2 Competition................................................................................................................. 9
2.1 Overall Solution Competitors .............................................................................. 9
2.2 Internet Interface Companies ............................................................................. 10
2.3 Ad Agency Tools Companies ............................................................................ 10
3 The Company: Populace Ads.................................................................................... 11
3.1 Mission and Goal ............................................................................................... 11
3.2 Product Description ............................................................................................ 11
3.2.1 The Main Service, the Website ................................................................... 11
3.2.2 The Partners Service ................................................................................... 13
3.2.3 Pricing ......................................................................................................... 13
3.3 Competitive Advantage ...................................................................................... 13
3.3.1 Initial Competitive Advantage .................................................................... 13
3.3.2 Sustainable Competitive Advantage ........................................................... 14
4 The Operational Plan ................................................................................................ 15
4.1 The Prototype Stage ........................................................................................... 15
4.1.1 Needed resources ........................................................................................ 15
4.1.2 Goals ........................................................................................................... 16
4.1.3 Exit Criteria................................................................................................. 16
4.2 Target Market Strategy....................................................................................... 16
Financial Forecast ..................................................................................................... 17
4.3.................................................................................................................................. 17
4.3.1 Personnel ..................................................................................................... 17
4.3.2 Technology Expenses ................................................................................. 17
4.3.3 Sales Forecast.............................................................................................. 17
4.3.4 Income Statement........................................................................................ 18
5 Team ......................................................................................................................... 18
6 Critical Risks ............................................................................................................. 19

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1 Executive Summary
1.1 The Opportunity
There are 15 million Small & Medium Businesses in the US, most of these companies
target local regions. It is estimated that local annual ad spend in the US is $100 billion.
Yet, only 7% of the SMBs put ads online.

Why?
Because currently online marketing requires Marketing and Technical expertise that
many SMB owners do not posses nor can they afford to hire consultants for.

Populace Ads will democratize online advertising by inventing a new service that lowers
the barrier for SMBs. The company will develop a website that is both easy to use and
affordable for SMBs to advertise online.

At the heart of Populace Ads’ solution, is an inventive Online-Ad-Engine that will
automate creation and management of online ad campaigns. This will reduce the cost
point for us, where we can offer our services at a very competitive and affordable price.
The resulting campaigns will be less customizable – so not suitable for big companies,
but productive for small & medium businesses.

SMBs make up a huge segment, not just in the US, but around the world. Our solution
can easily be translated to many languages and to support many business verticals.

1.2 The Need: seed money
Our execution plan includes 3 stages:
1- Prototype: spend 6 months building and optimizing the core engine and proving
that our ideas work for about 10 customers in one or two verticals.
2- US Market: spend 1-2 years focusing on expanding into several market verticals,
and adding support for many advertisement channels (content, video, etc.)
3- International Market: once well positioned, work on expanding our offering to
many new markets around the world in many languages and regions.

We need funding for the first stage. In this stage, we will create a prototype of the
Online-Ad-Engine to test the 3 main assumptions:
1- That automating these campaigns is possible at such low cost.
2- That online advertisement makes financial sense for small businesses in certain
verticals.
3- That we can reach SMBs and convince them to spend ad money on internet
campaigns.

For this we have a 6-month plan that will require around $50,000. This will pay the
salaries for 3 engineers. The salaries of the founders will be deferred.

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1.3 The Forecast
If our plan works, and we are able to build a system that would support 1:500 ratio of
SEM specialist to number of customers, by year 3 we can grow to support around 3000
customers and cross the $3,000,000 revenue per year.

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Market Analysis
In this section we introduce the online advertisement market, and then focus on the SMB
o
segment.

1.4 The Industry: Online Advertisement
Online advertisement is a sub group of total advertisement industry. It includes Ads
sub-group
served on the internet in different forms like Text, Image, Video, and Interactive Forms.
It also includes Mobile Ads served on cell phones through the internet.
ds

1.4.1 Size and Growth
In the US, Online Ads revenue in 2007 was estimated at $21 billion dollars at a %26
increase from 20061. This is about 20% of the total advertisement annual revenue.
Companies are seen generally to be switching ad dollars from traditional channels
generally
(newspapers, tv) to online ones.

U.S. Online Advertisement Spending
$25.0
$21.2
$20.0 $16.9
$ Billions

$15.0 $12.5
$
$9.6
$10.0 $8.1 $7.1
$6.0 $7.3
$4.6
$5.0
$0.0
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

1.4.2 The Industry Structure
The Online Advertisement Industry is mainly made of the following groups:
1- The Advertisers: the companies paying for ads. Examples:
:
a. Coca Cola (national ads, national product)
b. Fry’s Electronic Shop (national company, local products)
1
IAB and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Internet Advertising Revenue Report for 2007, May 2008, url:
,
http://www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_PwC_2007_full_year.pdf
http://www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_PwC_2007_full_year.pd

6


c. Tres Amigos Restaurant (local business, local service)

2- Ad Agencies: companies that create the ads and manage them for the advertisers.
Some advertisers choose to take this role.
a. Consultants: Most of companies in this category work as consultants,
offering expensive services to advertisers. Monthly cost is around $5-20K
per customer, and more. Examples:2
i. iCrossing, $31.3 million revenue in 2006
ii. 360i, $12 million revenue in 2005

b. Aggregators: few agencies attract large number of Medium-size
businesses and offer lower-price less-customized ad campaigns for them.
Monthly cost is around $2-8K per customer. Examples:
i. Cobalt Group, the auto-vertical.

c. Tools Providers: These are software companies that produce tools to help
Ad Agency Consultants in their work. Examples:
i. Efficient Frontiers
ii. Search Ignite
iii. Clickable

3- Ad Network/Ad Servers: Companies that collect the ads and serve them on the
internet. Examples:3
a. Google: around 35% of ads on the internet.
b. Double Click (acquired by Google in 2007): 34%
c. Yahoo: 12%
d. MSN: 10%
e. AOL: 5%

4- Publishers: The sites where the ads appear. Most publishers are smaller sites that
sell “ad real space” on their web pages to the Ad Networks. Examples:
a. Google Search Results, the search engine results page is the biggest ad
real space on the internet.
b. Yahoo Search Results
c. CNN, news websites sell ads between their articles.
d. Joe’s blog, some personal website.

1.5 Target Segment: Small and Medium Businesses
There are about 15 million Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) in the US4, and most of
them are of local-nature, like restaurants, small hotels, construction services, local stores,

2
Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave: Search Marketing Agencies, Q4 2006.
3
Attributor, The Ad Network Pie, March 2008, url: http://www.attributor.com/blog/get-your-fair-share-of-
the-ad-network-pie/
4
The Kelsey Group, 2007, through: Marchex, Perspectives on Local Online Advertising, 2008. site:
http://www.marchex.com

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etc. Companies in US spend around $100 billion annually on Local Advertisement (both
online and traditional channels)5.

The marketing and technical expertise needed to advertise online is rather high. This
creates a knowledge barrier to entry. This is why there is a lucrative industry for Ad
Agencies that specialize in creating and managing these ads.

As a result, smaller businesses that cannot afford Ad Agencies do not advertise online.
Out of the 15 million SMBs in the US, only 7% do online advertising6.

Online Advertising can be very effective for SMBs. According to Yahoo Research, 88%
of online advertisement revenue comes from purchases made in brick and mortar stores7.
Furthermore, 90% of customers prefer to buy locally after doing research on the internet8.

1.6 Further Details on Ad Agencies
In this section I explain few points on how Ad Agencies add value to their customers.

Ad Agencies create value to the advertisers by providing technical and marketing
expertise for online advertisement. This can be divided into the following:
1- Creating the Ad Campaigns:
a. Creative Ad Copy: This requires marketing knowledge (e.g. what buzz-
words grab attention of buyers?)
b. Campaign Structure: this requires both marketing strategy and technical
knowledge on creating big online ad campaigns.
c. Triggers: Online Ads require configuring triggers for the ads. This
requires both marketing and technical knowledge.
2- Managing the Ad Campaigns:
a. Running the Ad Campaign on different channels, like Google & Yahoo.
Requires technical knowledge and marketing tactics.
b. Running different campaigns at different times. Again, requiring both
technical and marketing knowledge.
3- Optimizing Ad Campaigns:
a. Replacing Creative Ads with more successful ones: technical knowledge.
b. Changing the bids on keywords depending on ROI: technical and
marketing analysis.
c. Optimizing ad campaign structure. Again requires technical & marketing
strategy.

5
Insider’s Report, Robert J. Coen,Universal McCann, December 2007, through Marchex, Call-Based
Advertising, 2008
6
The Kelsey Group, 2007, through: Marchex, Perspectives on Local Online Advertising, 2008. site:
http://www.marchex.com
7
Yahoo! Research, Research Online, Buy Offline, 2007.
8
Yahoo! Research, Research Online, Buy Offline, 2007.

8


As we can see, running an online ad campaign requires a good amount of marketing and
technical knowledge. Automating this requires further IT knowledge.

Ad Agencies’ employees manage ad campaigns manually. They use some tools to
automate few parts of this process. However, most of the automation is focused on
analysis of results, and copying the same campaigns to several channels (e.g. Google,
Yahoo, & MSN).

2 Competition
In this section I will list the main companies and ad agencies that can target SMBs (i.e.
low-cost solutions).

2.1 Overall Solution Competitors
These Competitors provide over all help to customers.

Due to high cost of creating and managing online advertisement campaigns, Ad Agencies
tend to focus on customers with big budgets. Aggregators drive their cost down by
creating semi-automated solutions. The semi-automated solution usually requires a 1:15
ratio of agent-to-customer.

I could not find any company that supports SMBs with budgets ($50-$1000), but the
closest I found are:
1- Marchex.com: an SEM consulting focusing on local advertising.
a. However, they seem expensive, and they do not show pricing on their
website.
b. They list Adobe & Microsoft as some of their customers, so I think they
target big customers with local online advertisement interest mainly.

2- CobaltGroup.com: they specialize on Internet Marketing Services for Automobile
Vertical. They offer SEM advertising in addition to site hosting and lead
managing.
a. They are focused only on auto-dealers
b. Their system is semi-automated.
c. Thus, their monthly service fee is ~$1500, in addition to a markup on ad
spend.

3- Individual Consultants: Individual consultants, usually students or entry-level
online marketing specialists, may charge small fees to gain experience and attract
early business.
a. This is not a sustainable competition.

4- The SMB owners themselves: few SMB owners might have the technical and
marketing expertise to run their own ad campaigns (e.g. if they already have an
Online Business, and thus are affluent with web technologies).
a. Their solutions will be limited.

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b. This will be a very small slice of SMB shops. Most SMB shops do not
even have a website.

2.2 Internet Interface Companies
The following companies offer an internet interface that allows users to create and
manage online ad campaigns. The users will have to do the actual work of creating the
online campaigns:

1- Google AdWords Simplified:
a. Google provides an interface to create individual ads and managing them.
b. However, the interface still requires a good amount of technical
knowledge.
c. It also does not fill the gap in marketing knowledge.
d. The interface limits the person to advertising on Google channels.
e. Limited management and analysis tools.

2- Yahoo Enterprise Ads:
a. Same as Google’s solution.
b. Limited to Yahoo.
c. Requires technical & marketing knowledge.
d. Limited management and analysis tools.

3- MSN

2.3 Ad Agency Tools Companies
Tool companies that produce software for use by Ad Agencies are a potential competitor.
While their current offering targets SEM specialists who want a tool to accelerate their
work, they might move in the future to offering simple tools for the advertisers directly.

1- Clickable.com:
a. The biggest SEM software provider.
b. Founded in 2006; still a startup, just raised Series B funding in July 2008
($14 M).
c. Focused on SEM specialists.
d. They have a small product for Advertisers, but it only does Analysis and
Management.
e. Does not offer Campaign Creation. This leaves the user to require a lot of
technical and marketing expertise to proceed.
f. They do not disclose their prices, but given their target customers, it will
most likely include a monthly fee and a percentage of ad spend.

2- Covario.com:
a. Also a recent startup.
b. Products targeted to the SEM and SEO specialist.

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c. They have a consulting arm.

There are several other similar companies in this field that were funded recently.
According to Venture Capitalists on the street, SEM startups were popular in 2006 and
2007, but not as much anymore.

3 The Company: Populace Ads
3.1 Mission and Goal
Populace Ads’ mission is to “Democratize Online Advertisement9.”

Our goal is to fill the gap in Online Advertisement market and offer an affordable and
easy-to-use service to Small and Medium (and possibly Micro) businesses. Just like
Grameen Bank, we want to be a profitable ad agency for many businesses that have
small advertisement budgets, and achieve an economy of scale.

The name of the company is not set yet. We need a name that is catchy and trust-worthy
for our customer base. The name can be finalized later.

3.2 Product Description
The Company’s main offering is a service, the website, for SMBs to create, manage, and
optimize online ad campaigns.

The company will also have a secondary product, partners portal, with which to offer the
main service through partners.

The company will have a sales force to market the website to the SMBs.

3.2.1 The Main Service, the Website
The website will offer an affordable and easy-to-use service to create, manage, and
optimize online ad campaigns. It will be targeted to SMBs.

The website will support a limited number of verticals and channels in the beginning. A
new Campaign Engine is needed to support create new Ad-Campaign types. New
Channel Plugins will be needed to support new ad-channels (e.g. Yahoo, MSN, Image
Ads, Video, etc.)

Interface Description
• The customer starts by answering few questions about their business
o Name and Location of Business
o Field of business (e.g. Construction)
9
Akin to Ford’s “Democratize the Automobile”

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o Services offered (e.g. Interior Painting, Exterior, Plumbing, etc.)
• The customer chooses the type of ads:
o Text ads, Image ads, possibly Video
o Where to show the ads (e.g. Google, Yahoo)
• The customer sets an ad budget.

Voila! The customer will have a complete ad campaign created and posted to the
requested channel.

The website will allow the customer to:
• Simple Optimization of the campaign: setting extra fields, writing few custom ad
lines, preventing certain ads from running.
• Simple Management of the campaign: start, stop, etc.
• Analysis of Performance

The website will automatically take care of:
• Creating the Campaigns
• Optimizing the Campaigns: optimizing the bids on keywords, and general
performance of the campaign.

Behind the Scenes
The website will use a Campaign Engine to create the online ad campaign. The
Campaign Engine is where the IP lies. It is created by both Marketing and Software
specialists. The Engine can takes the customer’s input and uses it to create a complete Ad
Campaign.

The website then pushes the Ad Campaign through Channel Plugins. The Channel
Plugins are created by Software Engineers to post the data to different places (e.g.
Google, Yahoo, etc.).

The website will also have an Optimization Component, that automates the process of
optimizing ad campaigns. This system will be overseen by an Operations Team
comprised of both IT and Marketing specialists. A fully-automated optimization engine
will be a special IP for the company. It will set it apart from competition.

The website will also have a simple yet powerful UI to Analyze Performance of the ad
campaigns. It is very important to prove our value to the customers. Thus, the UI is very
important to convince the customer that their ad budget is being spent wisely and that
they should increase it.

Finally, the website will also have a simple UI to Manage Ad Campaigns. The
management UI will give limited access to the user to start and stop different campaigns.
The user will not see the technical details of what happens behind the scenes (e.g. the
keywords we’re bidding on, etc.).

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3.2.2 The Partners Service
Reaching SMBs is one of the biggest challenges. A second is that most SMBs do not
have presence on the web. By partnering with SMB Portals or Aggregators, they can
funnel customers to us, and in return offer their customers an added service.

The partner’s product can work either as an API, or an IFrame component that is hosted
on their website.

3.2.3 Pricing

The SMB Pricing
There are several pricing methods that can be used:
1- Percentage of Ad Spend: we change 10-50% of ad spend. This is common in the
industry.

2- Monthly Fee: this can be a progressive fee depending on the channels used for
advertisement. We can offer Text Ads on Google with $0 fee, but charge
$50/month for Image Ads (or require a minimum ad budget).

3- Ad Discount from the Ad Network: some ad networks will give us bulk
discount for managing many accounts. This discount goes to our bottom line.

Partner Pricing
This will depend a lot on the partners, but most likely it’ll either be revenue sharing, or
we can charge the partner a fee for providing our service to their customers. We might
also have to pay partners in the beginning to host our service. This can be decided at a
future stage of the company.

3.3 Competitive Advantage
3.3.1 Initial Competitive Advantage

1- Targeting a generally neglected sector:
a. Most of the SEM consultant companies target medium and large
companies to create highly customizable campaigns at high prices. The
low-cost less-customizable market for SMBs is not targeted yet.

b. Affordable alternatives generally require higher technical and marketing
expertise than that available to most SMBs.

2- A New Approach
a. The fully-automated approach to campaign generation and management is
new. Several companies offer semi-automated systems that require a lot of
human intervention (e.g. CobaltGroup.com).

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b. The fully-automated approach also requires creative campaign templates
to generate the ads. Creating and optimizing these templates is a challenge
and many companies are not familiar with it.

3- Large Market
a. The SMB market is huge – different regions, languages, verticals, etc.

b. Even if other competitors enter early, there will generally be enough space
for Populace Ads to grow and optimize its operations before having to
clash and compete closely.

3.3.2 Sustainable Competitive Advantage

4- Delivering Results
a. This is one of the most challenging tasks of running internet advertising
campaigns: proving to the customer that they work. The added visibility into
the results of internet ads makes it easier to the customers to notice when they
are not effective (unlike traditional channels like TV & Newspapers which are
less traceable).

b. The Internet Advertising field, and especially Search Engine Marketing SEM,
is generally overcrowded currently, which pushes advertisement costs up.

c. Keeping an eye on results and spending time optimizing is a must to sustain
advantage over competition.

5- Big Data Sets
a. As we get more customers, we will be able to get more historical data on ads-
performance, and thus we’ll be able to optimize them further. A company with
1000 customers automatically has an advantage over another with 10
customers in terms of optimizing the creative content and campaign structure.

b. Staying on the Cutting Edge of Internet Advertising

c. The Internet Ad space is relatively a new one, and thus is continuously going
through innovation. We have to keep up with the new features to stay
competitive.

d. The structure of the service offered allows Populace Ads to add more channels
as we go. While we plan on starting with SEM, we can grow into other areas
like paid inclusion in review sites, etc.

6- Lower Price

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a. This is a limited advantage over companies that target large & medium
businesses. They will never be able to beat our prices given their manual or
semi-automated solutions.

b. However this will not be an advantage over competitors targeting SMBs with
their own automated solutions.

4 The Operational Plan
So far we have laid down the description of the company in general. In this section we
explain the direct needs and plans at the current stage.

The execution plan will include 4 main stages:
Stage Length Funding Description
Preparation 2 months $10,000 • rewrite business plan
(Google Award) • write core-engine specs
• secure Angel-funding
Prototype 6-9 months $50,000 (angel- • Build dev team in Amman
funding) • Build the core-engine + 1
channel + 1 vertical
• Find 5-10 customers
• Tune & optimize engine to
reach satisfactory performance
• Secure series-A funding
US Market 1-2 years Roughly $500K • CEO + Sales team in US
• Offer many ad channels
• Support many verticals
• Support up to 2000 customers
International 1+ years (self-funded) • Expand into developed
Expansion markets (Europe, possibly
Asia)
• Expand into emerging markets
(a huge percentage of SMBs)

At this time we’re focusing on defining and reaching the Prototype Stage.

4.1 The Prototype Stage
4.1.1 Needed resources
Funding: $50,000
Team: 1 VP of Engineering + 2 developers + 1 SEM specialist
Legal: register a company in Jordan

15


4.1.2 Goals
Goals of this period:
1- Build the core engine: Ad Creation and Optimization Engines.
2- Target a specific initial vertical
3- Target a specific channel (most likely Google Text Ads).
4- Find few beta customers (5-10 customers)
5- Tune-up the Creation and Optimization engines to run successful ads.

4.1.3 Exit Criteria
We can move to the next stage when the following is true:
1- The core engine is built
2- The customers are satisfied with their ad-campaign performance (the core-engine
is well tuned & optimized)
3- We demonstrate that driving down the cost point for creating & managing onlye
ad campaigns is feasible. The technical challenges are mostly resolved.

4.2 Target Market Strategy

According to industry research, the most local businesses searched on the internet are
restaurants (see figure below)10.

However, restaurants already have many websites fighting for their online ad money (e.g.
yelp.com, opentable.com). A good potential starting point is “Local Financial Services”,
like local accountants, insurance, and tax offices.

(figure based on industry research11)

10
Organization of Online-Publishers, Local Online Media Ads To Action, August 2008.
11
Organization of Online-Publishers, Local Online Media Ads To Action, August 2008.

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4.3 Financial Forecast
4.3.1 Personnel
Following is the forecast for personnel hired in the company:

Figures are in thousands of dollars.

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
monthly monthly monthly
Position num salary annual num salary annual num salary annual
CEO 0 $0.0 1 $3.0 $36.0 1 $3.0 $36.0
Marketing 0 $0.0 0 $0.0 1 $3.0 $36.0
CTO 1 $2.0 $24.0 1 $2.5 $30.0 1 $3.0 $36.0
exec total $24.0 $66.0 $108.0

Engineers 3 $2.0 $72.0 5 $2.5 $150.0 8 $3.0 $288.0
Online Ad
Tech 0 $0.0 2 $2.0 $48.0 4 $2.5 $120.0
Sales 0 $0.0 2 $1.5 $36.0 4 $1.8 $86.4
Support 0 $0.0 1 $1.0 $12.0 4 $1.2 $57.6

Total $96.0 $312.0 $660.0

4.3.2 Technology Expenses
year 1 Year 2 Year 3
num cost subtotal num cost subtotal num cost subtotal
Dev 3 $2.0 $6.0 3 $2.0 $6.0 5 $2.0 $10.0
machines
host 0 $0.0 $0.0 1 $6.0 $6.0 2 $6.0 $12.0
server
misc 12 $0.2 $2.4 12 $0.3 $3.6 12 $0.3 $3.6
Total $8.4 $15.6 $25.6

4.3.3 Sales Forecast
Average Customer $500 $500 $500
Monthly Spend

17


Number of Customers 100 800 2500
Annual Revenue $600,000 $4,800,000 $15,000,000

Keep Percentage 20% 30% 30%
Annual Cost (paid to $500,000 $3,692,308 $11,538,462
Ad Servers)

Gross Margin $100,000 $1,107,692 $3,461,538

4.3.4 Income Statement
Revenues $600,000 $4,800,000 $15,000,000
Cost of Revenue $500,000 $3,692,308 $11,538,462
% of rev 83% 77% 77%
Gross Profit $100,000 $1,107,692 $3,461,538
% of revenue 17% 23% 23%

Sales & Marketing $8,400 $111,600 $289,600
Product Development $72,000 $150,000 $288,000
General Admin $24,000 $66,000 $108,000
Operating Expenses Total $104,400 $327,600 $685,600
% 17% 7% 5%
Earnings before taxes (4,400.00) 780,092.31 2,775,938.46
taxes (440.00) 78,009.23 277,593.85
Net Income (3,960.00) 702,083.08 2,498,344.62
% of revenue -1% 15% 17%

5 Team
The Team current is made of 4 Computer Science Engineers:
1- Team Lead, Muhammad Arrabi
a. MS, Computer Science, Colorado State University
b. SEM certified specialist and SEM software developer.

2- Muneeb Arrabi
a. MS, Computer Science, State University of New York

3- Fadi Dallasheh
a. BSc, Computer Science, Princess Sumaya University

18


4- Ashraf Dabbas
a. BSc, Computer Science, University of Jordan
b. MBA, University of Jordan

6 Critical Risks
Possible risks for the idea:
1- The Technical Part is too hard
a. The Campaign Engine or the Optimization Component may prove
impossible to build 100% automated. They might require a degree of
manual support.
b. This will cause our operational expenses to go up.
c. Operations may rely on training local talent to fill such positions.
d. This will limit possible expansion since we’ll need to hire more people to
support more customers, but given less expensive salaries in Jordan, the
company can still succeed.

2- The local businesses do not need online advertising
a. We might get high resistance from local businesses to the idea of online
advertising.
b. Or, online advertising might make sense to only a few verticals.
c. This is a real danger, and we have to find the right vertical to grow in. If
no suitable vertical is found, then the nature of the company will have to
change drastically.

3- The competition compete on price
a. If we succeed, we are guaranteed to have competition in our field.
b. However, given the items in the ‘long-term competitive advantage’, it will
become a matter of execution. I am confident we will do well.
c. Customers of any form of advertising will never be too sensitive to price.
Building a relationship of trust and proved value will make sure that most
of our customers won’t leave us.

19

Populace ads business plan v1.5 (winner QRCE 3rd BP Competition 2009)

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