Sharing my Business Plan for Populace Ads - winner of Google Best Online Business Plan award at QRCE

Like many people around the world - I have more ideas than I can implement in a lifetime. I used to keep those in lists. But now, and inspired by Creative Commons and open source movements - I want to share them.

I admit that most of these ideas are not real because they are simply not good enough. However, if somebody reads them and gets inspired even a bit, and enhances them to a point where they get implemented - I would be very very happy.

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts under label "Sharing Ideas". All these ideas are shared under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 license. You can share them, change them, use them for any purpose - just attribute if you feel it's worth doing.

First idea to share - my award-winning Business Plan for Populace Ads - to democratize advertising for businesses around the world.

In 2008, we formed team Populace Ads and participated in the QRCE 3rd Business Plan Competition. We were happy to win the special "Google Best Online Business Plan" Award. The team was made of me, Muneeb Arrabi, Fadi Dallasheh, and Ashraf Dabbas.

We followed up with several great mentors and friends, and we modified the plan further - added major new idea (to create an advertising templates platform). However unfortunately we all got too busy with our current tasks and couldn't implement this plan.

I'm sharing the original business plan that was submitted to QRCE (and please forgive horrific financial mistakes - that was result of to little sleep), and the modified plan with the reformed ideas.

Hope somebody finds this useful.

Populace ads business plan v1.5 (winner QRCE 3rd BP Competition 2009) from Muhammad Arrabi

Populace ads business plan (Winner of QRCE 3rd BP Competition 2009) from Muhammad Arrabi

The Art of Start in Jordan slides

Ahmad Takatkah (@SinbadTheVC) and myself (@MRArrabi) gave this workshop at the IEEE event in Hashemite University on Oct 7, 2012. It covers tips & advice on how to launch your startup in Jordan.

Amazing article about startups by Paul Graham

I love this quote:

how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter.

http://paulgraham.com/swan.html

Thoughts on book "The Startup of You" by ReidHoffman (LinkedIn cofounder)

I finished reading The Startup of You book recently, written by Reid Hoffman (LInkedin cofounder) & Ben Casnoca. I thought I'd share few comments about it.

The book is great for those who want to enter the "Business World":

  - either fresh college graduates 

  - or technical people who want to make the jump to business roles

It gives a number of recommendations - that are frankly similar to a lot of other books. But the style is direct & clear, which makes for an easy reading.

The book has some interesting stories about birth of "Web 2.0" - namely the Paypal Mafia (must read wiki page). For example: both Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman bought the six-degrees patent early on. Mark created Zynga. Reid created LinkedIn. And they both were early investors in Zackerberg's Facebook, Path, Naseeb, Tribes, Flickr and Digg. (and many more). This makes you feel that Silicon Valley is just so small. [The book doesn't have details - just tips. look online for more]

In my opinion the book is not deep enough, with few exceptions, for people who have been in business roles for 3+ years. But it is very good for people about to enter this "business career" phase.

hope you like this.

Winner of Oud Compeition (under 18 yrs old)

(an old post from my lost blog ehcafe.com - Oct 2009)

Mohammad Abo Zikra from Egypt. The winner in the latest Oud Competition in Syria for under 18 years old.