Business Plan

“College Café”

Name : College Cafe

Fiscal Code : 123654789621
Registration Date : 01.04.2017
Director : Rotaru Corina
Adress : str. Sfatul Tarii nr. 29
mun.Chisinau, Republic of Moldova
Tel :+37369984562
E-mail : collegecafe@gmail.com
Date of business plan : 25.03.2017
Legal status : L.L.C.
Author : Rotaru Corina
Checking : Coropcean Svetlana

Chisinau , 2017
 Content :
1.Introduction…………………………………………………………… . 3
2.Executive Summary…………………………………………………….. 4
3.Industry analysis………………………………………………………… 5
4.Detailed description of the business……………………………………. 6
5.Production plan…………………………………………………………. 9
6.Marketing plan………………………………………………………….. 9
7.Organizational plan…………………………………………………….. 11
8.Assessment of risk………………………………………………………. 11
9.Finacial plan……………………………………………………………. 12

2
Introduction
The College Cafe is a Limited Liability Company and will be solely owned by its
founder, Rotaru Corina. The main business model for The College Cafe relies on college
students providing the textbooks, auctions, classifieds and teacher evaluations that are
posted on the website. Therefore, my focus relies heavily on the marketing strategy that
will increase traffic and usage and, in turn, maintain our inventory of products and
services. The College Cafe will enable students to buy, sell, and trade used textbooks
directly to other students, by-passing the university bookstores. The office of College
Cafe will be at str. Sfatul Tarii nr. 29 mun.Chisinau ,Republica Moldova .
The online address will be : www.collegecafe.md
The College Cafe will require an initial investment of 12 100 USD as well as
later rounds of investment. The initial capital will be used for marketing and customer
acquisition, software and website development.

The Purpose
The College Cafe aims to create a website where students will can buy, sell and
trade college textbooks, participate in auctions, post classified ads, provide teacher
evaluations, and buy products for college.

Mission
The College Cafe's mission is to provide college students a valuable and unique
source for products, services and information.

In order to achieve our mission, The College Cafe commits to the following philosophies:

 It's all about the product.

 Our customers are our employers.
 Don't be greedy.
 Keep our employees happy.

Objectives

The College Cafe will strive to achieve the following objectives:

 Become the leading Internet student-to-student marketplace

 Attract 500,000 registered users in the first year
 Achieve 50,000 visits per month
 Establish sustainable profitability within the first year

3
Executive Summary
The College Cafe is a student-to-student Internet marketplace providing college
students with the opportunity to buy, sell and trade college textbooks, participate in
auctions, post classified ads, provide teacher evaluations, and buy products for college.
The College Cafe will enable students to buy, sell, and trade used textbooks directly to
other students, by-passing the university bookstores. By selling textbooks to other
students, the seller can receive more money than the bookstore will pay and the buyer can
pay less than the bookstore charges. In addition to textbooks, students will be able to sell
class notes, old tests, computers, dorm accessories, used CDs, tutoring services or
anything students wish to sell via an online student-to-student marketplace. In
addition, the College Cafe will offer other services such as classifieds, teacher
evaluations, weblogs (bloggers), specialized content and retail.

The College Cafe will establish

itself as the leading online student-to-
student marketplace by combining
extensive market-specific expertise with
Internet technologies to generate revenue
while creating a win-win solution for
students. The College Cafe will achieve
market dominance by utilizing extensive domain experience, a local grass roots
marketing strategy, an exceptional management team, superior software, and the
formation of strategic alliances, memberships and partnerships with companies within the
college market.

My key to success will lie in my ability to execute my business model. In order to

achieve success, I need to focus on the following areas to establish The College Cafe as a
successful and profitable enterprise. They are:

 Recruit an exceptional management and marketing team with extensive domain

experience in the college market.
 Create and maintain a "Grass Roots" marketing campaign.
 Offer innovative and unique products and services.
 Form strategic alliances and partnerships with companies suppling products to the
college market.
4
Industry analysis
Competitors of The College Cafe includes traditional university bookstores, online
textbook retailers, textbook exchange sites, textbook price comparison sites, online
auction sites and online content specific sites targeting the college student market.The
follow statistics indicate that students are receptive to the Internet channel for the
products, services and content offered by the College
Cafe. Therefore my potential customers are students. College students are eager to find
ways to get "quick cash" at the end of every semester. One method college students use
is to sell their old textbooks at the end of every semester, however the re-sell market is
controlled by the local university bookstore. Because university bookstores monopolize
the market, students receive only a fraction of the value paid for the book, typically 75%
or less of the purchase prices. The bookstores then re-sell the books back to other
students, receiving over 125% profit. The current situation creates a lose-lose situation
for students and a win-win situation for bookstores. Students are looking for convenient,
money saving ways to purchase textbooks and to receive more value when re-selling
textbooks at the end of each semester.

 99% of students use the Internet

 93% of students use the Internet every month

 72% of students access the Internet at least daily

 92% of students own a computer

 13% of students plan on buying a computer in the next year

 15% of students indicated they are the first to buy a new tech gadget or device

 Students average 9 hours per week online

5
 Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5

Potential Growth CAGR

Customers

18-24 1% 28,400,000 28,684,000 28,970,840 29,260,548 29,553,153 1.00%

years of
age

25-29 2% 17,900,000 18,258,000 18,623,160 18,995,623 19,375,535 2.00%

years of
age

Male 2% 6,900,000 7,038,000 7,178,760 7,322,335 7,468,782 2.00%

Female 2% 9,000,000 9,180,000 9,363,600 9,550,872 9,741,889 2.00%

Total 1.55% 62,200,000 63,160,000 64,136,360 65,129,378 66,139,359 1.55%

Detailed description of the business

The College Cafe will offer college students a unique blend of products, services,
and content that is not offered by any single company on the Internet. The College Cafe
will aggregate participants, products, services and content to create a student-to-student
marketplace and retail website targeting 1 million students. The following describe The
College Cafe's revenue models:

Textbook Exchange

The College Cafe will offer functionality to

allow students to buy, sell and trade their used
textbooks with other students. Specifically, the
Textbook Exchange functionality allows students to
post their textbooks online for sale or trade, upload
images, and indicate the condition of the
book. Students looking for used textbooks will be
able to search for used textbooks for sale or trade in
their local area or nationwide. A fee will be charge
for posting textbooks. The fee may vary based on
the asking price of the textbook. Sample textbook
categories include:

6
  Accounting
 Business  History
 Computer Science  Law
 Engineering  Physics
 Marketing  Political Scienc

Auctions
The College Cafe will offer a powerful auction package. The Auction functionality
will have many features such as Standard, Reverse, Multi Item, Dutch and Blind
auctions; Flash Buy and Proxy Bidding. A fee will be charged for posting items to be
auctioned. The posting fee structure will be similar to eBay's. Sample auctions
categories include:
 Textbooks
 Class Notes
 Old Tests
 Used CDs & DVDs
 Computer Equipment
 Tickets
 Electronics
 Games
 Dorm Furnishing

Retail
The College Cafe will sell products targeted to college students. Margins will range
from 10% to 50% depending on the product. Sample product categories include:

 Textbooks
 CDs & DVDs
 Computer Equipment
 Electronics
 Games
 Appliances
 Dorm Furnishings
 University Merchandise
 Clothes
 General Merchandise

7
Classifieds
The College Cafe will offer fee based, student targeted, classifieds ads. Here many
features such as image upload, Web links and nested categories will be offered. A fee
will be charged for posting a classified. The amount charged will be based on the length
of time the classified will be posted. Sample classified categories include:

 Textbooks
 Class Notes
 Tutors
 Room Wanted
 For Rent
 For Sale
 Tickets
 Rides
 Help Wanted
 For Hire

Bloggers
The College Cafe will offer Weblogs (Bloggers) services with topics tailored toward
students. Weblog functionality will be a value added service to encourage students to
return to the site. Revenue for the Weblog will be generated from the sale of banner ad
space located within the Weblog pages. Depending on the Weblog topic, banner ad sales
will be targeted toward either local businesses in or around campus or national
companies. The fees for banner ad space will be determined by the length of posting,
number of users for the Weblog and demand. Weblog topics will include:
 College Sports

 Politics

 Entertainment

 Technology

 News

8
Production plan
The website is designed with the needs of the student as the focus. The College
Cafe is built using Microsoft technologies which will provide the flexibility to easily
expand products and service offerings in
the future. The College Cafe will initially
host the website with an external web-
hosting vendor thus reducing initial start-
up cost. At a later date, The College Cafe
may elect to bring hosting in-house for
better support and maintenance. The
Textbook Exchange, Auction, Classified,
and User Administration software was
purchased from Xcent Software, Inc and modified to support The College Cafe's business
needs. The rights to the source code of the Xcent's software were included in the
purchase price of the software. This will enable our programmers to customize the
software to support The College Cafe's growing business needs.The College Cafe website
and databases are hosted by Atl-Connect Internet Services which guarantees 99.99%
uptime. In addition to Web hosting, Atl-Connects provides site monitoring and statistical
performance metrics that include uptime, page views, unique users, banner impressions,
search keywords stats and link stats from other sites.

Marketing plan
The main business model for The College Cafe relies on college students providing
textbooks, auctions, classifieds and teacher evaluations available on the website.
Therefore, our focus will be on the marketing strategy to increase student traffic and
usage. In turn, visitor volume and transactions will maintain the inventory of products
and services offered.

The College Cafe recognizes the key to success as an extensive promotion strategy
to attract users. Once additional funding is secured the advertising and promotion plan
will be implemented. The College Cafe is looking to form relationships with major
companies in the college student market. Companies that we will approach included
university merchandise manufacturers or resellers, specialized content suppliers, new and
used textbook wholesalers and local businesses.
The College Cafe's overall advertising and promotional objectives are to:
9
  Acquire customers and generate sales.
 Position The College Cafe as the market leader.
 Increase company awareness and brand name recognition among students.
 Collect market research to create immediate and long-term marketing plans.

The College Cafe will attract customers by using a mixture of traditional and online
advertising strategies to create a grassroots marketing campaign.
Since the majority of The College Cafe's customer acquisition will result from direct
promotion local to universities, The College Cafe will recruit current college students to
fill positions in the areas of campus marketing, local advertisement sales and
implementation of a "grassroots" marketing campaign.

The following is a list of advertising and promotional channels The College Cafe will
utilize:

 Posting Flyer in and around campuses

 Direct Mailings
 University and local newspaper advertising and inserts
 Promotional item distribution
 Advertisements at on-campus kiosk
 "Welcome Back to School" registration booths
 "Welcome Back to School" care-package inserts
 Sponsorship of recreational/intermural team sports
 Sponsorships of campus or community events
 University and local newspaper advertising
 Indoor/outdoor billboard advertisements at college sporting events
 Banner ads on select related sites with a significant level of traffic
 Links on related web sites
Traditional media including direct mailings, magazines, radio and TV
 Registration with all the major search engines

10
Organizational plan
At the start The College Café will have only one owner , Rotaru Corina who will
manage all key roles and responsabilities in company. So ,The College Café doesn’t have
a organizational structure. The owner is a new entrepreneur on the market, but my
strongest point is the managing skills and knowledges in marketing domain. Also , I have
experience in financial management that I gain during four years of studying at college.
But in the future I will hire there or five people to
monitor the site. Our management team will
consists of three dedicated employees and two
technical advisors. Their backgrounds consist of
more than 30 years of experience in e-commerce,
marketing and the Internet technology. In
addition to their professional experience, the
management team has over 30 years of college
domain experience. Such depending on how they
will monitor the site will be and their salary.
Salary will be a percentage of 25 percent of
all sales.

Assessment of risk

11
Financial plan
My start-up costs assumptions are shown in the following table , and include Web
hosting, software, development and marketing expenses. The start-up costs
were financed by a private company that name a secret.

Start-up Expenses

Domain Name Registration $3

LLC Encrynption $12

GeoTrust True Site Certificate $100

Auction & Classified Software (Xcent) $500

Legal Fees $15

Computer (2 @ $2000) $4,000

Programming & Site Development $7,000

Site Hosting (1st 3 months) $120

Miscellance Expenses $200

Beta Launch Promotions $50

Search Engine Registration $100

TOTAL START-UP EXPENSES $12,100

12