Nimbus

A hub-style blogging platform.A fully-featured social network.

A community.

“Social”? We don’t think so.• “Sharing” seems to mean using a service to

distribute your content for you with a click, not creating a relationship with your readership.

• “Social” seems to mean collecting “friends” and “likes” and leaving comments no one will read.

How we see social.• We see social media the Web 2.0 way: real

collaboration. Using hypermedia and the Internet to authentically connect with people.

The State of the Industry


Industry trends create an opportunity.• Big Social Media platforms are moving toward “lifestreaming.”

• Culture blogs and long-form blogs are being left behind.

A blind spot in the market.• Look at the big blogging platforms Wordpress and

Blogger. They include almost no social features at all.

• In a medium with the potential to spark great debate, we have to ask: “Why isn’t blogging Web 2.0-ready?”


The big question: what if blogs acted more like wikis?

• Wikis give context: no media is an island.

• Hypermedia is the language of the world wide web.

• Our great wealth of digital hypermedia is trapped in a computer-readable format.

• We think a human-readable hypermedia would look like a wikified blog.

What Makes Nimbus Different?

Our madness is our method. Our differentiation is our philosophy.

We believe the solution to Web 2.0 blogging is built upon a sharing economy.

The sharing economy: what is it?• The sharing economy is an implementation of

the philosophy that access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them.

• The primary currency is trust and reputation.

• Effort is freely given and expected to be returned in kind.

• On the Internet a sharing economy’s resources are the intellectual commons.


The intellectual commons is the concept of the commons applied to intellectual property.

Intellectual property includes• Knowledge,

• Information,

• Expertise, and

• Culture.


Sharing = Branding?• This environment leads to an unconventional (and,

thus, potentially frightening) prospect for bloggers.

• An author’s cultural capital becomes a function of the community rather than isolation.

Don’t worry, be savvy!• This isn’t entirely uncharted territory. Web

2.0 is a decade-old convention.

• But we will be bringing a comprehensive suite of well-vetted social tools to blogging for the first time.


Hypermedia: the natural language of the Internet• Dense hypermedia interconnectivity

benefits authors and readers alike.

• Curated user reviews, tags, and content anthologies increase the interconnective mesh density.

• The result: more and easier avenues of traversal between a diverse range of topics.

• This wiki-walk workflow makes available a never-ending range of content outside of a user’s filter bubble.


A home on the Internet.• A centralized intellectual commons creates a

one-shop-stop for authors and readers.

• Our search, sort, and notification algorithms remove burden of vigilance.


Our ideal customer shares core values with us.• We believe that collaboration creates community.

• Giving gives back.

• Everything worth doing should be done for the greater good.

• We are authentic people, intelligently sharing our passions

• We are a shared audience hungry for information and culture.

• In the words of Carl of Sagan, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

• Community is how we share and participate in the zeitgeist.

Our Target Market

Adobe Max 2013 Conference session “Behance: Connecting the Creative World.”

• Insist on, in a global, Internet-ready setting, the use of psychographics rather than demographics.

Gave psychogrphics for the modern creative.• We seek work that is, first and foremost, intrinsically rewarding.

• We expect to be fully utilized and constantly optimized.

• We consider “open source” technology ours.

• We believe that “networking” is sharing.

• We insist on meritocracy.

Our Target Market

Lean Startup methodology.• An approach for launching businesses and products.

• Relies on validated learning, scientific experimentation, and iterative product releases.

• Shortens product development cycles, measure progress, and gain valuable customer feedback.

• Companies can design their products or services to meet the demands of their customer base without requiring large amounts of initial funding or expensive product launches.

The Road to Raamen

Let them eat raamen.• Y Combinator founder Paul Graham sites “raamen profitability”

as an important milestone in any tech startup’s life cycle.

• “Raamen profitability” means a startup makes just enough to cover operating costs as well as pay the founders’ living expenses.

The Road to Raamen

Development Phase• Building our minimum viable product.

• Gaining user traction by networking with bloggers and gathering feedback.

Alpha Phase• Our flagship bloggers seed our initial

content and hypermedia databases.

• Registration is limited to the flagship but all content is available to the public.

The Road to Raamen

Beta Phase• Registration is opened to the public.

• We begin taking subscriptions.

Launch• Continue iterating and releasing features and fixes.

The Road to Raamen

T minus four months.• Two months of strict development.

• 1 month Alpha Phase

• 1 month Beta Phase

• Monthly burn: $7,435.

$31,690 to Launch

The Road to Raamen

Revenue• Nimbus operates as a “freemium” service. Reading

is free. Users must subscribe for the full suite of features (posting content, joining groups, etc.).

• $5 a month: industry standard, but we offer far more than industry standard.

Sources of funding.• Accellerators, venture capital, loans, and crowdfunding.

The Road to Raamen

Potential reach.• The natural progression of our platform is to entirely

absorb the markets of Wordpress and Blogger.

• The retirement of Google Reader makes a new market available.

• Our external RSS feed import feature adds the functionality of Google Reader to our reading list management system.

Nimbus: The Future

Potential growth.• The basic platform can also spin off additional services for

• Fiction

• Web comics

• Photography

• Enterprise solutions

Nimbus: The Future

An actionable roadmap.• We are building a relationship with Dane101, a prominent

local blogging syndicate. Along with authors, they bring domain expertise and a model for our ideal user.

• We are seeking mentorship and funding from an accelerator such as Gener8tor, Y Combinator, or TechStars.

• We will develop and deploy our minimum viable product (MVP) to begin Alpha Phase.

• We may seek additional funding through venture capital and loans.

• Following the lean startup methodology: we are always testing, learning from, and refining our product.

Not Just Castles in the Sky

Writing software is the easy part.• Our team consists of a programmer and designer, both

with big dreams and serious chops. We can build it.

• But we also understand that a user isn’t a metric, it’s a person. Their trust must be earned. Nurturing those relationships—that’s the tough job, achieved through transparency and direct, hands-on relationships.

• We understand this not just as Nimbus’ founders, but as its target market. We want to live in a world where a community like Nimbus is flourishing.

Built on High Ground

Thank Youfor your time and consideration

Investor Relations

Nimbus