Business Opportunity
Convenience and time-saving are two key factors that encourage online shopping. However, consumers now spend, on average, 10-20 hours/week online[1] to get to what they want, in various activities such as comparison shopping, researching, and using online services. This laborious shopping pattern puts a burden on the consumers’ time and leads to higher advertising and customer acquisition costs for the businesses. There is a significant opportunity in, instead, letting the consumers declare what they want, and bringing the market and information to them.

For consumers, Inoof is an online service that enables them to declare what they want and delivers the information/service requested in a simple convenient format within a specified period of time. It aggregates the relevant/desired information from multiple online sources, thus saving time for the consumers. Inoof connects the consumers with the appropriate providers for online services such as shopping, research and premium content and funnels incentives from the providers to the consumer. These services and information are presented to the consumer via a rich, customizable website. Users benefit from this time-saving “here’s what I want, you come to me” approach, lower prices and additional incentives. Our mission is to make Inoof.com the go-to site for online shopping and related activities.

For businesses, Inoof is a new channel that offers an opportunity for targeted sales and advertising enabling businesses to offer custom products and services for their users. Inoof provides valuable Business Intelligence to retailers, based on the aggregate “wanted” data shared by the consumers, and enables them to sell to the consumers via the Inoof portal. Businesses get access to a huge base of “ready-to-buy” consumers, thereby reducing their customer acquisition costs. Inoof significantly increases their ROI by more effective targeting, and provides a completely new source of predictive sales intelligence.

Our market is the 60-90MM online users who use comparison shopping and aggregator sites. The addressable size of the market exceeds $20bn in advertisement spending. An initial investment of $1MM will allow us to build our team, product and some partnerships in 12 months. A subsequent investment of $2MM will enable us to establish our brand, enhance the product, get customers and achieve profitability.

Example: Say you want to buy a digital camera by Christmas. You conveniently add it to the shopping list on the Inoof Portal via your mobile device, email, instant message (IM), text messaging (SMS), or while browsing a retailer’s website. Our short-term vision, when you view your shopping list, is to display useful and targeted information about the product you want to buy, such as deals/coupons, special offers from retailers that could reduce your purchase price, integrated options to purchase it from within the portal, review digests/summaries, recommendations and more. Meanwhile, retailers that have subscribed to the Inoof Business Intelligence data will get valuable information such as “200 users in zip code 01824 want to buy a digital camera by Christmas” and much more.

Used car example: Say you want to buy a used car. You specify the criteria that are important to you on a car list/page – a mileage range, a price range, few models, and some premium features. The car shopping engine will search through hundreds of cars from sites such as Edmunds.com and kellybluebook.com etc, in addition to reviews, dealer incentives and more. The engine will process this data using proprietary algorithms, and recommend the top 5 cars that you may want to look at.

[1] Gomez.com research (http://www.gomez.com/); Online Publishers Association (http://www.online-publishers.org/); Shop.org statistics; IT Facts (http://www.itfacts.biz/)