Viral link bait: Web 2.0 Pizza Shop
Naked Pizza is a local pizza shop who is looking to become a franchise. They hope to acheive this with backing from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban through his stimulous plan which is an open source funding effort to help promising ideas come to life. The concept is genius. Basically, entrepreneurs were asked to post a business plan for a startup. From his post…
I will invest money in businesses presented here on this blog. No minimum, no maximum, but a very specific set of rules. Here they are:
1. It can be an existing business or a start up.
2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops
6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered
7. Everyone must work. The organization is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder/owners and everyone else
8. You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download
9. I make no promises that if your business is profitable, that I will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own
10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.
11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.
12. In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.
13. No mult-level marketing programs (added 2/10/09 1pm)
Now, how do you a brick and mortar business hip and cool so it spreads virally online? Simple, you cater to the geeks. No matter what service or product you are selling you will need to go through the geeks who spend day and night on the web. If they like what they see then they will help you spread the word. It’s that simple. It becomes a lot easier when you have financial backing from a web geek like Mark Cuban. Mentions on his blog as well as Techcrunch give you street cred and will make things happen.
Naked Pizza is using Twitter to spread the word even further. This is a smart marketing channel because it serves as a mailing list so they can reach consumers. The sign is rather big though and I think it might cause a little confusion since it looks like the shops name is Twitter. They have over 2400 followers on Twitter right now. This provides them with constant contact with the locals. However, I am a little surprised to see that they only have 4 reviews on yelp.
I look forward to seeing how this spreads.
