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Biz Plan
February 2, 1999

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Change Notes:
6/29/99 Added link to Forbes ASAP story about Dell because no one believed us.

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Purpose of Plan

This plan is here for one and only one reason: entertainment.  iTulip.com is not a real company.  You can't invest privately in iTulip.com nor buy publically-traded stock in iTulip.com.  There are plenty of screwy little Internet companies to blow your hard-earned dough on, so don't be disappointed that iTulip.com, while small and screwy, ain't one of them.  Too bad, though, 'cause the plan's pretty darn compelling.

Confidentiality Notice

Are you kidding?  This thing is on the friggin' Internet.

Introduction

This plan is a work in progress.  That means it's not done yet.  The whole company is a work in progress, but then aren't all companies that way?  Sure they are.  This one in particular.

Exec Summary

We got a great team and a kick-ass product and lots of enthusiasm and plenty of beer.  What else do ya need?  We're rockin'!  We turned a profit in Q1 after selling just ten Bogus "Stock Certificates" in the first few days of the 1999.  The financials are a totally conservative extrapolation based on a continuation of the same action from our audience of Internet investor skeptics.  We're adding new products this quarter.  We'll double every year!  As Hunter S. Thompson might ask, Why not?

Management Team

And what a team it is. Stroooooong!

Pictures and BIOs here.

Company Positioning

iTulip.com is unique.  It is the first Internet company on earth to not offer some jerkweed Web-based doo-dah that's neat to use for a couple of days and then forget about, such as you're own personal Web forum, like you have time to monitor one after you've worked 12 hours today in the New Economy (just like the old one but with longer hours).  We will try to keep iTulip.com from degenerating into a so-called portal, a site you go to to get to other sites because no one's yet figured out how help you organize bookmarks intelligently.  No, we're creating a totally new kind of Internet company.  Totally different.  New.  Different.  Yeh.

Products

Our flagship product is the iTulip.com Bogus "Stock Certificate."  The gimmick here is that iTulip.com visitors buy this iTulip.com stock certificate that's completely worthless and show it to their friends who also have worthless stock certificates in, say, Amazon.com, except the guy who bought the certificate in this fake company called iTulip.com paid ten bucks while his friends paid thousands for their now-worthless Amazon.com stock certificate.  What a riot!  Just think of the laughs!

Next comes iTulip.comÙ merchandising.  Items include T-Shirts ("I lost $100,000 on Internet stocks and all I get was this lousy T-Shirt"), pens, and hats.

Target Customer

Our target market is people who want buy just the kind of stuff we sell.  That's a really big market -- too big -- so to narrow it down and stay focussed, we're going to make stuff that folks want to buy who don't want to buy stock in Internet companies at inflated prices. We call them Internet Hammerheads.  They don't believe that Internet companies that have no means of turning a profit will survive once the rampant speculation in Internet companies ceases.  They're no fun at parties but, trust me, you'll be looking them up for a loan after the market takes a dump. Stuff at a profit to Internet Hammerheads.  That's us.

Revenue Model

How are we going to make revenue and profits?  Why, we're going to emulate the business model of no less an iTulipÙ phenomena than Dell Computer, Intel, and Microsoft.  Dell Computer earned $2.5 million over the last three years selling computing equipment, according to Forbes' ASAP magazine.  But that's nothing compared to the $3.1 billion Dell made selling "puts" and buying "calls" in its own stock.  (A "put" is an option to sell a stock in the future at a set price; a "call" is the right to buy stock in the future at a set price.)  Maybe you thought Michael Dell was making money the old-fashioned way, selling Dell computers.  Nope.  More earnings have come from speculating on Dell stock in the stock market. And this speculation was done in a way that was only beneficial to the company if the price of Dell shares kept rising.  With Dell stock rising more than 4,000% since February 1996, a fire hose stream of cash pours from the expired puts.  Naturally, this results in highly inflated bottom lines in Dell's and other companies' earnings reports.  Here's our business model in a nutshell:

Sell Bogus iTulip.comÙ Stock Certificates from the iTulip.com site to get a little revenue going

IPO with valuation based on 10,000,000 times revenue

Plant a couple of rumors on financial chat groups and let the day traders talk our stock up

Make a ton of dough selling puts and buying calls on inflated iTulip.com stock just like the big boys at Dell, MS, and Intel

Earnings from speculation in our own stock raises the value of the company, propelling the stock price through the roof

Is that a brilliant plan or what!!??

Marketing

The short term marketing objective is market share.  To achieve it, we build brand awareness and keep visitors with constantly changing, interesting and informative content.

Awareness building revolves around PR, cross-linking, and search engines.  We're totally on track on the PR side.  PR has so far brought more than 25,000 visitors to iTulip.com.  We aren't so much interested in "hits" but we do track page views, which total 69,319 as of the last update to the Biz Plan.

Digital Ink

Here are some of the sites that have given us press on their sites:

CNBC Cool Site of the Day
February 9, 1999
CNBC plugs iTulip.com on national TV
Washington Post
March 25, 1999
Review: "Sites With a Twist"
Canadian Online Explorer (CANOE)
"Canada's leading news and information site"
March 18,1999
Listing
STERN Online
March 17, 1999
The Yahoo! of Denmark
Review: "Internetaktien: Big Bubbles, No Troubles?"
Third Age
March 15, 1999
"The Web... for GrownUps"
Review: "Psst! Wanna Buy Some Worthless Stock?"
The Independent
March 9, 1999
Venerable UK Daily briefly reviews iTulip.com
Digi
March 3, 1999
The Yahoo! of Norway
Review
Yahoo!
March 1, 1999
Pick of the Week
Planet Click
March 1, 1999
Premier rated Web site directory
Pick of the Week

Links

Here's a partial list of the companies that have linked to iTulip.com:
Fiend's Superbear Page
The world's #1 site for up-to-date links to bear news and views.
Robot Wisdom
Weblog of up-to-date links to the news stories and sites with an edge.
Net Conductor
Internet bull's site.
Skeptic News
"The 'What's New' page for skeptics"
Investor Guide Weekly
A free, comprehensive resource for investing and personal finance.
Colin's Financial Pages
The Fiend's Superbear page of the UK
Stockz
The Financial Link Exchange
Web Digest for Marketers
Contraryinvestor

Search Engines

You can find iTulip.com with the following search engines that we know about:

AOL NetFind
HotBot
WebCrawler
Alta Vista
Netscape Search
Lycos
Yahoo!
Excite
gotonet
dogpile
looksmart
Jeeves
savvysearch.com
infind.com
Infoseek
google.com
debriefing.com/

Brand

Shortly iTulipÙ and iTulip.comÙ will have a little ® next to them.  By promoting the term iTulipÙ to refer to uneconomical Internet companies, we are building our brand.  Look for the iTulipÙ trademark in the articles in the financial press.

Financial

Profits from the get-go.  Tip to investors: a company that does not plan to earn profits asap has no rational organizing principle of operation.  Stay away.  Now in our case, as I said before the products are cheap to make and we sell them at a profit.  On top of that our expenses are low, so we not only have gross profits we have net profits as well.  In this way we're not like most Internet companies.  Nope.

* IPO

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