William Sircin Nick Sprinkel Steve Williams Sep. 21, 2012

1. William Sircin Nick Sprinkel Steve Williams Sep. 21, 2012

2. The Story Unibike Theories, Inc. was conceived in 2010 at Sky Tree Artpocalypse, the infamous week-long experimental art festival that convenes every September in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Website designer Nick Sprinkel, a first time Sky Tree attendee, and Steve Williams, a brilliant but unpredictable Kettering dropout, met while standing in line for absinthe snow cones and immediately hit it off. They were soon wandering the festival grounds together in one hundred degree heat, taking in a panoply of hallucinatory sights and sounds. But Sprinkel and Williams’ Sky Tree sojourn, and their newly forged friendship, took an unexpected turn a few days later. One evening they came across a crowd that was cheering on a wild-looking character as he jumped the gap between a pair of ten-foot-high dirt ramps while astride what appeared to be a homemade motorized unicycle. Again and again he flew through the empty air on his contraption, executing head over foot cartwheels and three hundred sixty degree pirouettes, as a girl in a bikini, fur boots, and waistlength dreadlocks stood directly beneath him and blew bright orange fireballs in his direction. Williams and Sprinkel were both immediately captivated by the demonstration. Williams, who had been nicknamed “Dr. Frankenstein” by his Kettering classmates, fell in love with this beautifully absurd bit of engineering genius. Sprinkel, on the other hand, could not help but notice the number of onlookers who exclaimed that they wanted a motorized unicylce of their own.

3. After the last jump had been completed and the crowd had dispersed, Sprinkel and Williams approached the performer and introduced themselves. Thus they made the acquaintance of William Sircin, circus acrobat and self-proclaimed “stunt wizard.” He showed them his unicycle, which he had built himself on a dare from another professional stunt performer. Williams and Sprinkel, without having discussed it beforehand, then simultaneously asked if he would be interested in manufacturing and selling them. Sircin intitially scoffed at the proposal, but Sprinkel proved a convincing pitchman, and by the end of the week the three of them had formed a loose preliminary business plan. They then spent the next six months searching in vain for a source of funding. During that time they continued to modify and perfect the vehicle’s design, and built up a list of friends and acquaintances—mostly other stunt performers—who expressed serious interest in owning one. Finally, in Spring 2011, they met Marcario Tatopolous, the twenty-one year-old son of an expatriate Greek billionaire. An aficionado of sky diving, hang gliding and other thrill-seeking pursuits, he instantly understood the appeal of the “unicycle dirt bike,” and agreed to provide seed capital for the venture.With it they purchased an old auto body repair shop in Portland, Oregon, converted it into a factory/showroom, and produced their first two Unibikes, which were sold to a couple of married stunt riders in Miami.

4. The Team CEO: Stephen Williams. Although Nick Sprinkel initially assumed the leading role at Unibike Theories, Williams very quickly demonstrated a preternatural talent for business organization. He was also instrumental in selecting the half-dozen technicians and designers who make up the company’s “floor team.” CTO: Nick Sprinkle. Sprinkel’s experience as a web developer made him an ideal choice for the role of Unibike’s “Information Czar.” He directs the company’s internal information management systems, as well as overseeing its online presence. CFO: Marcario Tatopolous. Marc was given the role of Chief Financial Officer as a condition of his agreement to provide funding. He was clearly motivated by a desire to prove his maturity and sense of responsibility in the eyes of his father. Nonetheless, he has acquitted himself very well in this role. He also has many contacts in the world of wealthy, bored young people who enjoy doing dangerous things. COO: Williams Sircin. Sircin is the nominal Chief Operating Officer of the company, as well as its public face. He spends much of his time traveling and giving demonstrations of the product. Most of the company’s first customers were his peers in the acrobatic performance world.

5. The Products The major product of Unibike Theories is, of course, the Unibike, a motorized unicycle designed for dirtbike-style stunt riding and racing. Each Unibike is a custom-built product, created from scratch according to the client’s specifications. They have become something of a prestige item, and usually cost $12,000-$15,000 per unit. Each unit takes about a week to assemble. Parts are machined onsite. Initial inquiries are made ONLINE, with clients then being invited for one on one consultations to finalize the order. Also for sale is a range of merchandise—t-shirts, helmets, bumper stickers, water bottles, etc.—bearing the company’s logo. This merchandise is available ONLINE only, at the company’s website. Unibike Theories also provides an indoor track in a warehouse space adjacent to the factory. Unibike riding lessons are available here to the general public. It is also home to special Unibike stunt demos and races. This is, in reality, the company’s only “STOREFRONT” operation.

6. Customer Demographics The majority of people who actually purchase Unibikes belong to one of two groups: • Professional stunt riders or acrobats • Young rich people Unibikes are rather expensive and potentially quite dangerous, and they are not legal forms of street transportation in most states. As a result, they are not logical choices for the general population. They sell not more than a few dozen each year. However, Unibike Theories offers basic Unibike riding lessons at their indoor track in Portland. These lessons are safe, relatively inexpensive, and make the Unibike experience available to anyone over the age of 18. This service provides Unibike Theories with a fairly large portion of its overall income.

7. Marketing Storefront/ Physical: • Promotional stunt demonstrations - Organize local demonstrations as well as traveling to various states to promote product. • Print ads (newspaper/magazine) – Not only will we be using advertisements in the following magazines and newspaper, but we may possibly be able to get some journalists interested in writing about our invention. Stunt demonstrations, online games and viral videos should directly help with this. • MotoCross Mag(http://www.motocrossactionmag.com/Main/Home.aspx) • DirtRider Mag(http://www.dirtrider.com/) • Popular Mechanics Mag(http://www.popularmechanics.com/) • Newspapers (Seattle Times, The Oregonian) • Television commercials: • These commercials would start out local to build a base, then move throughout the states depending on how successful our business becomes. They should target our customer demographics. Online: • Viral videos – In order to make the most appealing videos, our company might want to invest in some action-sport video cameras that mount on a riders helmet. A short, well-organized, documentary posted on YouTube could attract a strong customer base. • Online/App (for Andriod/Apple) games (Unibike Stunt Master)- Our CFO could invest in a companies that could design addictive games that users could play during their free time • Banner ads – UniBike Theories, Inc. Could utilize banner adds within websites that are popular among our customer base. Consider the magazine websites above in addition to social media sites such as Facebook.

8. A Spoonful of Alphabet Soup: CRM vs. ERP Our decision to choose a customer relationship management system over an enterprise resource planning system was based on two major considerations. As Laudon and Laudon (2012) explain, the purpose of an ERP system is to combine business processes within and even across organizations: “Information that was previously fragmented in many different systems is stored in a single comprehensive data repository where it can be used by many different parts of the business” (p. 51). We immediately concluded that such a system would be better suited to a very large organization with many employees and discrete departments. Since our business has only a handful of employees and a minimum amount of hierarchical organization, an ERP would be of little use to us. What we do have is a relatively small customer base, for whom we provide a custom built product. Maintaining our niche, and expanding it whenever we can, is of utmost importance, and so we decided that we would be wise to adopt a customer relationship management system.

9. And the Winner is… We have decided to give Salesforce.com: Professional Edition a try as our customer relationship management system. We are integrating this CRM into our business after several months of operation. Before that we were building our base by making bikes for friends and friends of friends, and relying on a very informal word-of-mouth system. We are now beginning to gain a bit of momentum, however, and have decided to experiment with an information system. This is particularly helpful when it comes to our “side business” offering riding lessons on our in-house dirt track. These lessons are our gateway to the “real world,” offering people outside of the limited demographic of circus performers and stunt professionals to whom we were initially catering. We will certainly be in good company. Salesforce.com is hugely popular among enterprises both large and small; motor vehicle-centric businesses ranging from the independent vehicle sharing service wheelz.com to motorcycle manufacturing giant Honda claim to be highly satisfied with this particular CRM.

10. A (Slightly) Closer Look We admit that we were initially attracted to Salesforce because of its status as the elder statesman of CRM providers. Also, they offer a 30 day free trial, so we didn’t feel like we had too much to lose. This particular product does, however, have a number of additional attractive features. It boasts a highly detailed “dashboard” interface that organizes important sales and marketing figures for easy analysis. This may not have been important at the outset of our venture but as our in-house business grows and our Unibikes begin selling to more and more clients throughout the country and around the world, it will pay to have these numbers in graph form. Another potentially helpful feature of the salesforce.com online CRM is Chatter, a sort of internal online network for members of the enterprise. Much of our marketing strategy at this point involves staging demonstration shows both locally and around the country, so any communication tool that we can find will be helpful to us. If one of us is on the West Coast, for example, coordinating a stunt show, we can provide immediate feedback on turnout, etc., using this tool. Chatter also lets us follow customers, but we’ll have to see just how receptive our clients are to using it (Lendino).

11. A More Slightly Closer Look One of the nicest features of the salesforce.com product is the accompanying access to AppExchange, “an online marketplace of integrated third party applications built for the Salesforce.com community, managed by Salesforce.com and delivered by partners or third-party developers” (crmsearch.com). AppExcahnge provides salesforce.com users with the opportunity to modify their CRM more or less on the fly as new features become available. There are some 17,000 apps currently available through AppExchange, and Salesforce is planning to provide more based upon customer requests. Finally, we plan to take advantage of salesforce.com’s mass email campaign feature. This Professional Edition only allows a client to send 250 mass emails in a 24-hour period, however, we should be able to work around that. Any mass email campaigns will be centered on bringing in customers to participate in riding lessons on our in-house dirt track. We can use the mass email option to keep previous customers aware of new events and offers, while using social media and print ads in local magazines and newspapers to appeal to new customers.

12. Pros of SalesForce • SalesForce is an established, professional, and solidly built software as a service (SaaS) company. They have been in operation since the 1990s and have proven themselves within the field. • SalesForce contains AppEchange, which offers many applications that will allow our company to create a tailor made CRM system. • SalesForce continually offers new ‘innovative’ services such as Apex, ContentExchange and SuccessForce. Each of these applications can further streamline our business. Apex is an object-oriented (like C++ or Java) development platform. ContentExchange manages content within the CRM system, while SuccessForce establishes an effective user community within the CRM system • The user interface that SalesForce offers is simple to use with little or no training required. Therefore, this system is ideal for a company like ours that is just starting out with little or no CRM experience. • Perhaps most importantly for our company, SalesForce offers cloud computing . Though we have a large sum of money to pull from, the affordability of SalesForce allows us to invest our money in other areas of the company in order to improve upon our product.

13. Cons of SalesForce • Although SalesForce does offer tailor-made software, there are over five-hundred million people using the software. This limits how tailored their SaaS can be per each company. • If SalesForce does not have the appropriate solution for a business, Online-Crm.com notes that they suggest the company build it using their Apex development software rather than build a solution for the user. • Downtime is always an issue when using a cloud-based CRM system. Online-Crm.com has pointed out that SalesForce has had several outages over the past couple of years. • Small Businesses can be left out of a service level agreement. SalesForce “selects” who they wish to make agreements with.

14. The Damages A subscription to the Professional Edition of Salesforce will cost us $65 per month per user following the end of the 30 day trial period. The only users for the time being will be William Sircin, Nicholas Sprinkel, Stephen Williams, and Marcario; the total cost will, then, be $260 per month. Considering the fact that we have unlimited funds, this seems like a reasonable amount to expend on what is essentially an experiment. (Salesforce.com)

15. Revenue Models Sales Revenue Model: This is of course our primary, and currently our only, revenue model. Revenue is derived from two main sources: Sales of our custom made motorized stunt unicycles, and riding lessons/unibike rentals. We also generate some revenue from sales of merchandise such as T-shirts but that is definitely not our main revenue stream. Any of these things may be purchased online; requests for actual unibikes are generally made by email or phone, and after that we arrange a consultation, either in person or by teleconference, to negotiate details. Subscription Revenue: This is an experimental concept that we have not yet implemented. We are considering setting up a subscription based “Uniriders Club.” This would entitle members to a year’s worth of riding lessons, rentals, and track time. We still have not decided on a pricing scheme.

16. Curdbee Curdbeeis an online billing application, designed to consolidate numerous facets of the invoicing process. It supports an number of online payment gateways—such as Paypal, Google Checkout, and the like—and automatically calculates taxes, shipping costs, and discounts. Additionally, it features time tracking, expense reporting capabilities, and other organizational tools designed to make billing as simple as possible. When we began our venture and were constructing Unibikes one at a time for friends, we had little need for billing software, and even now that we are fielding requests from around the world, we don’t usually have more than half a dozen requests in process at any given time. Nonetheless, it helps to have a little structure in our invoicing process. We are currently using the free version, but may upgrade if we decide to start using CurdBee to track billable hours.

17. Eventwax This is an event organization application. It allows you to create special web pages for events, sell tickets online, create and manage attendee lists, and organize email marketing campaigns. Events are not really a major source of income for us, although occasionally we will pair up with a sponsor to finance something. Nonetheless, exhibition shows are a major part of our marketing strategy. These shows are designed to show off the product’s capability as a “stunt unicycle.” Individuals who have purchased a Unibike and achieved some level of mastery of it are often invited to participate as performers in the shows. However, we do not expect a huge number of people to invest in one of our admittedly expensive and potentially dangerous products. Our main goal is to increase visibility of the product for individuals who might then be encouraged to take riding lessons in the safe and controlled environment of our in-house track. Also, we have the opportunity to sell a bit of peripheral merchandise, such as T shirts, DVDs, and posters at these events.

18. EveryTrail.com Every Trail is a unique web2.0 platform that allows users to plan traveling/adventure trips using geo-tagging. It is also a type of social networking site that allows users with similar interests to interact with one another and share details about their outdoor travel experiences. The platform can also be accessed via android or apple devices, which allows users to be able to communicate/map travel routes while away from a keyboard. We plan on using the technologies offered in EveryTrailallow our customers to map journeys/trips together. The interactive website will allow our customers to share their experiences using our unique unicycle technology, and in turn, this will promote our product by allowing others to see what our customers are doing with the unicycle. It is important to note that use of this website is free for anyone, which will help our company invest funds elsewhere to improve our product line.

19. JustinTV.com Justin TV is another interactive website utilizing web2.0 technologies. The site allows users to create a live broadcast via a “channel” which displays activities they would like to share. The web 2.0 plaform primarily uses Adobe Flash to view videos. In addition, QuickTime Broadcaster, Camtwist, Wirecast and other third party software are used to add effects to user videos (Wikipedia, 2012). The Justin TV website states that “live video can help[…]motivate a crowd to tell their friends what’s happening […] (JustinTV,n.d.). We plan on using the features within this website to offer our customers tips/techniques while riding our unicycle motorbike. We also plan on using JustinTV to broadcast live racing events, simple repair tutorials, and to introduce other product models to the community. Justin TV offers our company the ability to locate a community of people that are interested in the sport of motor-unicycling by allowing customers to interact with one another socially with the web platfom. Similar to Every Trail, costomers who follow us on JustinTV can help us promote our product by sharing their experiences on our channel. Use of Justin TV is free, which again allows our company to invest earned revenue into more essential parts of our company.

20. QuoteBase • Quote Base is web2.0 platform that allows business’ to create quotes for customers.It not only helps create quotes it is used to delegate the duties of who would actually create the quote. Those assigned to the quote will receive e-mail. Quote Base can be altered by the industry and company size, in the case of growth or any changes of our company. • Quote Base allows you to add items that are going to be required on the quote including labor hours, parts, price incorporated with it. It can add description, tax, and even discounts the quote. It can also give receipt and even send an copy of the receipt. • For our company we would use this Web 2.0 technology to collaborate as a business in creating quote breakdowns for customers.

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