Executive Summary

Powered by a network of venue owners, promoters, DJs/Bands, SFnight will bring the most extensive and intensive online nightlife information and resources to San Francisco nightlife customers. Planning a perfect night out is now easier than ever before.

San Francisco has a very intensive nightlife entertainment activity and is considered the most wired city, according to several market researchers. Potential nightlife goers include not only 801,400 SF residents, but also 6.5 million Bay Area residents and 16.8 million annual visitors. While Internet has become a great resource for local information and people have Zagat.com for restaurants and Hollywood.com for movies, SF has dedicated itself to creating a specialized nightlife websites to facilitate consumers' planning process of going out.

Most of SFnight competitors focus their business on consumers of nightlife entertainment, and provide generic local information, while failing to provide a well segmented, targeted and customized information to their users. Our advantages over our competitors in consumer market is being specialized.

While SFnight's competitors are struggling on their profitability on nightlife market, SFnight has created a new sustainable revenue model which will keep SFnight highly competitive in the long run. SFnight keeps its costs lower than its competitors by offering several thousands of nightlife players the opportunity and capability to update information by themselves. Our value-added advertising and service differentiation will also keep us in better position in generating more revenues.

Our clients are also our partners. When working closely with nightlife players, SFnight will gain popularity through players who usually have followers and strong network in nightlife industry.

Company Overview

Mission Statement

SFnight will provide online information to nightlife consumers and players by creating a network environment focused on bars, clubs and events in San Francisco.

Vision

By combining at the same environment nightlife consumers and nightlife producers -- including bar owners, promoters, DJs, bands -- SFnight will bring the most extensive and intensive online nightlife information and resources to San Francisco nightlife customers.

The natural evolution of SFnight business would be to extend their model to other cities, specially Bay area counties.

Our success will mainly depend on whether we can establish a positive reinforcing mechanism within our system to build the players network: the more updated information we can provide on our site, the more users we will get; the more users will get, the more information we can provide.

Goals

To achieve our business mission, SFnight will pursue the following goals:

Build an information infrastructure to provide nightlife consumers with the most update and complete online information about San Francisco nightlife, focused in bars, clubs, and their events.

Build a network of nightlife players based in San Francisco to better provide updated events and venue information and help them to achieve their business goals.

Provide customization capabilities that highly enhance the experience and satisfaction of nightlife consumers and players that makes user decisions a quick and easy process.

Provide entertainment to enhance users web experience and satisfaction, and bring traffic to the site.

Develop competitive features such as E-Flyers and Event Plan List ("Add to a List to E-mail a Friend"), to address users' needs and advertising strategies.

Focus on building partnerships with industry bar and entertainment, and tourism industry.

Building partnerships with local information providers to syndicate information

Business Overview

Nightlife consumers visit bars and nightclubs for different purposes -- entertainment, being social, relaxing. In order to make sure their nightlife experience meets their expectations, they seek venues/events information before they go out. Traditionally, nightlife consumers acquire these information mainly from friends and print media like magazine and newspapers. In San Francisco, venue customers used to look at BayGuardian or SFweekly for venue and event listings.

Internet has become a great source for local information. Specialized websites on restaurants and movies have been developed successfully. Zagat.com, for example, has become a popular Internet destination focused on restaurant's menu, prices and reviews. San Francisco nightlife information has been presented online by online news providers and local information portals like citysearch.com, whose design is not targeted at nightlife consumers.

The information-seeking behaviors of nightlife consumers vary a lot, depending on their familiarity with SF nightlife, their frequencies of nights-out, and their venue/event preferences. The widespread availability of online services has increased consumers' demand for a website specialized and customized nightlife information. We have seen several attempts to create such a website.

Due to the high information maintenance cost and limited options to generate revenues, however, none of these websites have succeeded. SFnight will cut its cost by providing an online services for nightlife players, specifically event promotion tools to update their information by themselves, at the same time create more revenues opportunities by service differentiation for players.

Nightlife players have been considered those with less Internet experience. With the increasing popularity of Internet, however, the players have gained their Internet experience to the point where we believe they can actually use the tools provided to them through our website.

As the first website that specifically target nightlife players' needs, SFnight will have first-mover advantage to establish a co-beneficial relationship with nightlife players. This relationship will be enforced by our continued free services for players: they will not only be able to maintain their own information, but also receive direct and indirect feedback from consumers through their personal page on SFnight Together we will be able to provide better information services for nightlife consumers.

Features

Some of the features and service that SFnight will provide to its users are:

Nightlife Consumers

Personalization Features, enabled by an easy registration process users will get Editor's recommendations according to their event and music styles. Editor's Picks events at Homepage, a customized area at the homepage show the most important events of the week that match user profile. MySFNIGHT, a personalized area to display a Event Calendar based on Editors' Picks and based on user choices; short cut to venues and DJs selected by users; short cut to reviews written by users. For example, with one click user can add from any search results, or venue and event profile, Customized Newsletter enable users to receive nightlife information according to their preferences.

Peer Reviews/Recommend systems Nightlife customers can express their impression or satisfaction with a venue

Multiple search capabilities Search venues by bar/club types, location, name and by other life style categorization based on needs. Search events by dates, music style, event type.

Bar/Club, event, detailed information built into profile, providing a complete sense of venue atmosphere and clientele.

E-flyers, electronic flyers that will benefit consumers, players, as well as SFnight: Users don't need to pick up flyers physically. Promoters can upload by themselves. They save flyer distribution cost and flyer production cost. SFnight benefit by gaining more traffic and put additional ad. Electronic flyers will also create one more opportunity for players to realize the value of SFnight, when customers use print-version of flyers for entry.

Entertainment section, will provide to users ways of listening their favorites DJ and Bands. Partnerships with the Music Industry will be develop for e-commerce opportunities and advertising.

Discussion section, will create a community environment at SFnight. It will be the glue that will bring more interaction between customers, and customers and players, as well as inside the players network.

Free Membership

 

Nightlife Players

FREE tool for customer emailing list subscription.

FREE listings for events.

Statistics to show how popular the venue is on SFnight.

Access to SFnight outstanding nightlife market research and bar industry news.

A package of Event promotion services: E-flyers; mailing list of subscribers; special promotions

Features that will help them to organize events: A one-stop event organization point that will help venue, promoters and DJ find the right place, the best atmosphere and size for events, and find the right promoter or DJ to run the event.

Ticket selling, provided by third parties.

Multimedia features to promote their events.

 

Target Markets

The Nightlife Customers. Our studies have shown that SF nightlife entertainment customers vary according to nightlife frequency activities and motivations. SFnight will mainly target two major market segments - frequent customers and visitors --, although its multiple services will also appeal to other segments or market scheme. Our information categorization and features was also based on our target audience motivations to choose a venue or event to go (entertainment seekers, regulars, drop-in-customers, meet-and-go customers, dinners).

Frequent nightlife customers. Weather is a group of friends or couple, these people go out to bars or clubs, at least five days a month, range in the age from 18 to 45 years old, mainly professionals, and highly connected. They are the most relevant market segment for SFnight business. SFnight will appeal to them by providing a well-segmented categorization, customized information to plan group activities, special promotions and discounts, as well as after-events activities (write reviews), and an entertainment section. We anticipate a fast growth rate in this segment as we increase popularity by providing services like e-flyers and group plan activities features.

Visitors (tourists and business travelers). We consider 80% SF visitors as our potential one-time users, while 20% frequent visitors (visited SF 5+ times before) could be our repeated users. A distinct information segmentation and multimedia features will provide the right sense of the entertainment atmosphere scene, making their decision a fast and reliable choice. They can find SFnight through search engines or travel agents when they plan a trip to SF. The fact that more and more SF's hotels are providing very inexpensive Internet access for their guests also creates more opportunities for our exposure to SF visitors. To reach these people, SFnight will partner with hotel patrons, tourist agency services, and business convention organizers.

The Nightlife Bar Industry Players. SFnight expects to receive strong support from about 1,000 venue owners (including general manager of venues), several thousand of individual promoters, DJs, and bands. Besides promoting themselves, SFnight will help them on acquire direct or indirect feedback from nightlife consumers. We will target the following segments, defined by their set of activities on the bar industry:

The Bar Owners, there are more than 600-800 bars/clubs at SF area. The city's bar scenes varies in sizes and types, moving from entertainment clubs to informal neighborhood dives. For the venue event providers, SFnight offers several ways to organize and promote their events, reach their potential audience and improve their businesses. Although SFnight strategy is highly focused on event providers, its online information structure will be appealing to other venue segments as well, offering more exposure and advantages of using a collaborative environment enabled by SFnight network.

Promoters, those who organize parties, music shows, and rent the space from bar owners for their activities. Some are professional promoters, and others are amateur. SFnight will appeal to them by providing a quick and easy way to promote events, and by facilitating their contact with venues, DJs and bands. Special promotions features such as SFnight newsletter, E-flyers and a very target subscribers base will help them on achieving their business goals.

DJs and Musicians usually are contracted by promoters, and can be the main attraction of the night bar activities. DJs are not a recognized professional category, and depends on their own network to develop their activities, by working directly with other DJs or been subcontracted by a promoter. SFnight information infrastructure will help them gain more visibility among promoters and other DJs. Also multimedia features and the Entertainment section of SFnight will be an important marketing tool to promote their events to potential clientele.

Competitive Analysis

As a nightlife information-online based publisher, SFnight considers newspapers, nightlife magazines (or booklets), and nightlife websites as our main competitors in the sense of acquiring potential users and advertisers. We need to effectively compete with the widely held idea that advertising-based business doesn't have sustainability

Printed Media Printed media, including newspapers, magazines and booklets, have traditionally provided nightlife information. The transformation of this service to the online model has generated competitive business opportunities, which extends to users other functionalities and services, besides up-to-date nightlife information. In fact we believe as Internet gets its popularity, print media will gradually become less desirable information sources for timely information, because they are limited by the space hard paper can provide, by few functionalities they can offer to assist users, and by less potential revenues opportunities their online competitors can offer.

The BayGuardian used to be a very popular information resource for bay area residents who look for nightlife information. Compared to nightlife websites, however, BayGuardian has lost its attraction and it looks more like a nightlife yellow page that can only offer venue names, phone numbers, and addresses. Our survey shows that most users find such information very helpful as music type, clientele, band or DJ, which can't be found in BayGuardian's venue/event listings. Two free booklets, Releasesf and Flyers, provide a more detailed event listing with a wider coverage on venues. They both cover information on DJ/bands, music type, prices, etc. But they are restrained by the limitations of print media and being color print they are more expensive to produce and distribute.

Online Media The online marketplace has three main business models, but a limited number of local players:

Editorial News provider. The ones that maximize the newspaper editorial experience and have the advantage of being localized, best represented by Sfgate.com.

Local information provider. The model that integrates entertainment and city facilities into one information service, specially target to travelers, who will find the same environment in several cities around the world, which includes competitors such as Citysearch.com.

One-segmented information model. The model completely focused in one aspect of nightlife information and entertainment, such as online services for DJs (target in music consumers) or basic bar information.

Our review of the market concludes that there are three online information providers that direct will compete with SFnight for consumers. Indirectly SFnight will be competing with local online business that are advertise-based, whether they are focus or not on nightlife activities or services.

The main competitors of SFnight will be:

www.citysearch.com A city-based entertainment information integrator, which include restaurants, movies, nightlife, and hotels. It provides editorial reviews and local event coverage. It is our main competitor, and the one that closest match consumer's information structure that will be provided by SFnight It has a strong penetration on hotel industry and local organizations, and has strategically positioned themselves as local information providers to other portals. Its affiliation with Ticketmasters, a leading seller of event tickets on and off the Web, and Evite, an invitation tool service, strategically expand their user customer base. However, consumers are not provided with personalized features, and easy and quick ways of finding information in accordance to their nightlife style and preferences. And they do not provide a player network environment.

www.sfgate.com Online news and entertainment information provider, that fells in the first model. Information is not rated, and not highly organized to achieve users different needs and behaviors. More focused on events, do not provide much information about venues. Users has to navigate through several layers to find venues or events information. They are mainly editorial content providers and do not provide any kind of costumer interaction and personalized features.

See more about competitors

 

Market Strategy

SFnight has the advantage of providing an integrated and focused environment that will bring customized information and services and entertainment to customers, and business opportunities nightlife players, which differentiates from its competitors in both businesses model and strategy. We believe a good SF nightlife information website should have the following market strategy:

Complete coverage of SF bars and nightclubs

Up-to-date and accurate venues/events information

Recommendations from users and/or editors

Customized information and services

Customer-centric oriented

Information architecture and user interface that provides different navigation/search options, target different preferences, needs and behaviors.

The Table 1 shows how our services differentiate from our competitors:

 

Table 1: MAJOR DIFFERENTIATIONS Services, Features, etc SFGATE CITYSEARCH SFNIGHT Coverage News & Entertainment Local information: Restaurant, Hotel, Nightclubs, Events etc Venues and their events Integrated local information services yes yes no Specialization on bars/nightclubs industry no no yes In-depth venue coverage no yes yes Breadth venue coverage no yes yes In-depth event coverage no no yes Breadth event coverage no no yes Editorial recommendations yes yes yes [Editor's Picks] Customer's recommendations no no yes Rating & consumer review no yes yes Customized Information no no yes [MySFnight; Newsletter] Entertainment (music) no no yes [Entertainment section] Multimedia features no no yes [music and video samples] Focused audience no no yes Broad audience yes yes no Invitation feature no yes [Evite] yes [E-Flyers] Venue specific newsletter subscription no no yes Discussion [community] no no yes Match no yes no Ticket Selling no yes yes Reservation system no yes not so relevant for venues Reminder System no no plan to have Promotion Features no no yes [E-Flyers + specific promotions] Target on Players no no yes [Network] Event promotion no no yes Statistics for Players [Events/Venue/Reviews etc] no no yes Information targeting in specific needs no no yes E-commerce window no yes plan to have Brand yes yes no Low cost on maintain information no no yes Favor on small venue owners and promoters no no yes Customer-centric oriented no yes yes

 

Revenue Model

With the breakdown of subscription model, how to make money has become a big challenge for any information providers. As indicated in business overview, we have seen some attempts to create a specialized nightlife information website at SF, and none of them can claim success. The main reason lies on the dilemma of generating revenues.

Since the venue and event information can change every day, the cost of collecting and maintaining up-to-date information is high and these high cost have to be justified by revenues. On the other hand, there are not many options for nightlife information providers to generate revenues. It is almost impossible to either charge nightlife consumers for information access or ask for listing fees from players without affecting the quality of information content. Therefore, most of nightlife information providers generate their revenues mainly from advertising while some of those with high reputation can charge players for information listing.

The bad news is that advertising is also costly to get and usually don't seem enough to afford maintaining up-to-date information. That is why most of our competitors have to cut their cost, but it usually jeopardizes the values of their information services. The following table summarizes different ways nightlife information providers have used to maintain their profitability and the result of their action.

 

Table 2: NIGHTLIFE INFORMATION PROVIDERS AND WAYS OF MAINTAIN PROFITABILITY Ways Effects on Profit Examples Effect on Information Services for Consumers Brief venue info only Cost savings BayGuardian only list names, addresses, phones in its venue/event listings Only serve as a yellow page Limited listings of venues Cost savings Sfgate.com only list about 100 bars in its bar guide Users have limited venue options Relate reviews with advertising Cost savings &Revenue generation Citysearch use their marketing team to collect/update information Information loses its credibility Charge players being listed Revenue generation BayGuardian used to list their previous or current advertisers' information. they just changed their policy recently. Less venue options Differentiate services Revenue generation Citysearch.com charge for hosting a venue schedule and it also charges more if players want to have a customized websites hosted on Citysearch. Could be good for consumers since more information is provided.

 

We expect in the end of competition there will be only one or two main players in the market and the survivor has to the one who has established a sustainable revenue model. SFNIGHT will compete with all existing nightlife information providers with lower cost and higher revenues. We will keep our information maintenance cost lower than all our competitors by providing an online service for nightlife players to easily update their information by themselves. Our editors only need to approve the status of players and monitor the quality of the information fed in. We will also create more revenues by the following channels:

Value-added advertising

Our potential advertisers can be anyone who wants to target bar goers, like liquor companies, record companies, venue owners, promoters. These people happen to big money spender on promotion. We estimate promoters need to spend about half of their money on promotion (see our detailed estimate). Liquor companies or record companies have large budget for promotion every calendar year. To grab a larger piece of this big "pie", we need to show our potential advertisers sufficient reasons why they should advertise on our website. Compared to our competitors, SFnight can add extra values to our advertisers by:

Targeting at very specific market. Sfnight has been designed in such way that consumers with different needs and preferences would all be satisfied. As a result, most of pages in our website target at a very segmented market which some companies would love to reach. For example, BMG music may want to promote CD "Contaxt" in our "Piano Bar" page, whose visitors probably are interested in Broadway music; Liquor companies may want to promote their new products on our "Drinks Specials" page, whose visitors will probably be heavy drinkers, since they care more about drink price. Taxi companies may want to advertise on our "First time at SF" page; Print companies may want to advertise on our network page to get more print work from players. For venue owners and promoters, apparently they would be more interested in advertising on pages corresponding to their types or their location.

Flexible advertising spending. Event promotion is expensive, especially for small promoters. The smallest ads on Bayguardian (see example) cost $125 when a quarter-page ad cost $525 (the price is offered only if half-year contract is signed). The cheapest ad on FREE magazine cost $1,750, which is one page ads inside magazine. In contrast, advertising spending on SFnight is flexible, since ads is impression-based and can be controlled by our ad server.

Knowing the value of advertising. Our Statistics tool on network page will allow players to check how many users view their profiles, add to favorite lists, etc. Players can know the value of placing a banner ad on our website by noticing how much more traffic is brought to their profiles.

Service Differentiation

Our basic services for players, including venue listings, schedule listings, and some other useful features, will be totally free. Based on that, we will charge for advanced services, including hosting music sample, video sample, even live performance, and customized web design.

Data licensing fees

Once we are able to maintain information with higher quality than our competitors, we may be able to sell our data as a whole or as customized. For example, one day sfgate decide to compete with citysearch on their bar information. Instead of establishing a whole team, they can partner with SFnight. We can also create customized bar information for companies or hotels to give to their employees or customers.

Others, like E-commerce Opportunities , Partnership

 

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Specialization in bars/nightclubs industry SFnight is only focused on bars/nightclubs information and this allows us to provide customization and personalization features (like "Add to a list to e-mail friends", MySFnight [Event Calendar with Editor's picks, user's Picks etc]) targeting at bars/nightclubs consumers.

The only online service for SF nightlife players SFnight is the only website for nightlife players to update their information with high convenience and flexibility, besides providing several features to help promote and organize the their events.

SFnight provides up-to-date event information at bars/nightclubs and allows users to retrieve them easily. Citysearch only allows user to browse event information by date and music type, and sfgate only allows user to search by music type and comedy. Our event search functions cover all types of events that can happen in bars/nightclubs.

Low cost on maintaining information In most cases SFnight only need to monitor information quality provided by players, instead of sending editors to collect them. Editors will be able to concentrate on their activities of selecting, and elaborating appropriate reviews to users.

Multimedia information for venues/events Our survey shows that people find music sample or video samples are helpful/very helpful. None of our competitors currently provides such information.

Favor on small venue owners and small promoters Since we allows players to feed in information by themselves for free, small venue owners and party promoters can get more exposure to the public with low budget. Our competitors like Citysearch or Bayguardian don't list them unless they pay for advertising.

Higher credibility SFnight will distinct the information provided by Editors from the ones provided by promoters. Also will offer a rating system to users that enables them to rate the usefulness of that description. This will provide a way to control the quality of the information provided.

Features high-traffic generate E-flyers and "List to E-mail" carries ads as well as expand our audience bringing more traffic to the site.

Weakness

No brand in the industry. Compared to Citysearch or BayGuardian, we are a small player and we will have to invest more on marketing ourselves to establish our popularity and reputation.

Not being a local information portal. Our competitors like Citysearch.com and sfgate.com are more like local information portal and their ability to provide alternatives, like concert or movies information, give consumers options to choose between going to a bar/nightlife or going to a movie.

Opportunities

SFnight user base is expanding. We are glad to see that more and more visitors are able to get online in their hotel rooms. For example, the Grand Haytt hotel in SF only charge $5.95 more for a room with Internet access. People are more likely to search for information online instead of using traditional media. Our survey also shows the same trend for bay area residents (see customer survey).

The whole business model is very expandable. We can apply this model to other cities without much change. This also will help the network to do more business outside their boundaries

Take advantage of local advertising. Local companies will benefit from advertising in a web site focused in consumers and network players: both complementary (clothes, other nightlife events, etc) and bar industry (equipment, services, food etc for the industry). We have analyzed each information section of our website to better target the audience.

Take advantage of Music Industry advertising. By providing music samples and entertainment section, SFnight provides a very focused audience to Music Industry target their advertisings.

Take advantage of Bar Industry and Music Equipment Supplies Advertising and Promotions. Our network will provide a very target audience to suppliers, such as liquor companies, bar equipment etc.

Threats

Easy to copy. The idea and information architecture and content are easy to be copied.

Some popular venues-based websites are coming to SF. La2nite.com has opened their New York and London sites and they have been promising to come to SF since last year. Another competitor clubplanet.com currently have sites for 20 cities and we expect they will open SF site soon.

 

Implementation Plan

Further Site development

We estimate we actually have gone half way on our site development, since the whole site infrastructure has been built and we have pretty clear ideas about how those undeveloped pages should look like. The following is the list of things that we are considering on further site development.

Pages under construction

The pages that under construction are top navigation secions: entertainment, E-flyers and Discussion, as well as left navigation sections. Click on each page, you can see our design for each section and majority of implementaiton would only include a customized design html template for that page.

Transfering to Oracle / Sybase

As we discussed in technology, we highly recommend using Oracle/ Sybase as backend database in the real implementation. Only very few codes in Perl scripts need to be changed because of the change of backend database. The main change regarding Perl codes will be to double-check the compatibility of SQL commands using in mysql like date functions, etc). To re-build a database in Oracle / Sybase and port all data should be fairly easy.

We understand that transferring to a commercial database will cost more money in terms of web hosting, but the improved site performance because of this change will finally pay it off.

User Interface design

Develop Privacy Statement and Terms of Use

Develop Help page, and contextual help

New design solutions

Improve design elements, such as buttons, icons etc

More usability testings, especially on players interface

Browser compatibility, fixed-relative fonts, page load

More marketing-oriented messages

for details, see User Interface Design

Improved Algorithm for event / venue recommendation system.

The improvement will mainly include introduction a correlation matrix into the system. For details, see Technology section.

Content Development

We expect in the long term our venue information will be provided and updated by players, but in the beginning we will need to have a complete venue listings. There are two ways to build this database:

Partnership with information providers. Such information providers can be Flyer or Releasesf. Both of them have established some traditional channels to collect information and have their social network in the industry. The values we can add to them are that we can provide an electronically version of their print magazine, adding value to their content with our services and features and we can also make their information collection much easier by our technology (SFnight Network and SFnight Insider). Such partners can also add brand effect to our site and will bring more site visitors, especially in the beginning.

Another way is that we go around the city and collect information by ourselves. This would add extra cost for us in the beginning, but the advantages compared to first way will be that we have higher flexibility in terms of what kind of information we need to collect.

Partnership Development

Being a specialized nightlife website, SFnight is dedicated to offering our users all possible services they may need for planning a perfect night out. On the other hand, it won't be desirable to design every service from scratches. Building partnership is therefore a cost-effective solution.

Content partner

Venue Listings Partner, as discussed above.

DJ listings websites, like DJentral.com, thedjlist.com. DJ listings is an important part for our project, but we haven't spent that much time in exploring it. Possible partnership with DJ listings websites is to cross-reference each other.

Service Partner

Webcast service to provide streamline online music and live video. like liveonthenet.com, live365.com

Traffic services

Ticket selling services

Invitation service

Site Promotion

Once the site is launched, SFnight will need to promote both in consumer market and player market to gain reputation. Between consumer and player market, we highly recommend putting higher priority on player market, for the following reasons:

Consumer market is too big and it cost a lot of money to gain so little popularity.

Player market is relatively small and since we are first website that specifically target at their needs, it is easier to acquire their support and build user loyalty.

Develop a good relationship with a player will potentially brings his/her followers into our site.

Hosting a venue / event website on SFnight can generate a lot of traffic to our site and at the same time players will promote our site by putting such sentence in their flyers:

"Please check our website on www.sfnight.com/club_nv/"