Executive Summary
Company: The team was formed, ad-hoc during Atlanta Startup Weekend. There is no legal entity. Counsel advises that Intellectual Property belongs, jointly to the contributors. In principal, participants intend to assign all rights to the company without restriction. Trademark search shows EventTank as clear (available), copyright takes longer to discern.
There are no technological hurdles seen at this time. This also makes entry easy for competitors. Legal hurdles may exist that have not caused any issues so far, these include restrictions on data aggregated from third-party sites, such as the storage of data. There may be financial or licensing hurdles.
We would be pleased to see the investors recoup investment and make above-average returns. In exchange, we want to recoup sleep we lost at Startup Weekend, enjoy building a useful service, and gain a reasonable financial reward.
Value Proposition: Certain, current EventTank functionality, such as searching event calendars aggregated from many sources, is not available in the marketplace. We see many chargeable services that can be layered upon event search.
Planned EventTank functionality, such as “curated event calendars,” event organizing tools, flexible payment options, and filtered output of combined calendars are unavailable or unsatisfactory from existing Websites. A motivating factor is that several team members use event calendars and organize events. As daily or weekly users of alternative online tools, we see EventTank as valuable. These event functionalities let organizers work faster, help users find events they want, enable curators to publish their view of important events, and output combined calendars for all of us in any calendar format. This wider range of uses for different user types – and for the long term – reinforces our view that EventTank serves a valuable role in event search and event organization.
Team: Our startup team is Cliff Tunnell (legal), Sharon Temper (test), Mike Schinkel (dev), Sima Parekh (project management), John Kidd (dev), and Jim Caruso (biz dev/pr). Our organization structure is flat at this time.
Advantages include access to resources, such as hosting, backend developers, front-end developers, business development, project management, marketing, PR, legal, finance, time, etc. Our team embers are active in the Web and development communities. A disadvantage is no dedicated staff or exclusive focus by the principals.
Revenues are envisioned as coming from: Web advertising, paid sponsor search results, paid sponsor event promotion, curator fees, organizer fees (enabling them post to many event Websites from ours), transaction fees from payment mechanisms, high-volume or custom output, and professional services.
Market: The team recognizes that the event industry and online search are large markets, however, we need more time to size our target.
Exit: These tools extend or enhance existing online tools without directly competing. This makes our venture attractive as an acquisition target for any of the many Web-based event sites, owned by Google, Yahoo (Upcoming), Eventful, Eventbrite, etc.