This document proposes a startup called BiblioGraph that would operate a marketplace for researchers to publish, share, and sell access to bibliographies and references. It would allow students and independent researchers to post questions and offer bounties for good bibliographies. By scraping citation data, BiblioGraph could build a graph database of citations and topics. The business model would generate revenue from marketplace fees and referral fees to databases when users access full journal articles. The founder proposes acquiring users by paying students to contribute and offering free paper editing to undergraduate students.

1. BibilioGraph
“Bibliographies and Reference Material as a Service”
A half-baked startup idea by Jason D. Rowley (@jason_rowley)

2. Starting A Research Project
SUCKS…
• Search is usually a terrible way to find the most relevant
journal articles at the start of a research project.
• Even on sites like JSTOR, advanced search doesn’t turn
up the best results.
• Usually, the best suggestions are surfaced by human
librarians, or the assigning professor, but sometimes they
aren’t available. (ex. You started your project at like 2AM
and it’s due in 10 hours.)
• However, once you get that first sweet reference piece,
gathering information is usually smooth sailing from there.

3. Enter BiblioGraph…
• A marketplace for researchers to publish, tag, and
(optionally) sell access to their paper’s abstracts
and bibliographies.
• A forum for students and independent researchers
to post research questions and $$ bounties for
good bibliographies and references.

4. Secret Sauce
• Makes research a social activity. Gives grad
students a way to make a little extra money on the
side, etc.
• Because BiblioGraph only accepts citations and
bibliographies in standard formats (Chicago, MLA,
APA, etc) we can scrape that content behind the
scenes to build our own graph database of
citations, and how they relate to topics.

5. Business Model
• Revenue Source 1: Extract marketplace fees from
citation bounties and paid bibliography sharing.
• Revenue Source 2: Extract referral fee from online
databases like JSTOR for sending users there to
download journal articles.

6. User Acquisition Strategy
• Pay (hungry) Masters and PhD students, and
postdocs, to upload their bibliographies and abstracts
to as many papers as they have. This helps us seed
our database.
• Onboard undergraduates by offering free paper
editing services for first 50 users on each campus, and
incentivize them to invite their friends to the platform.
• Focus first on the social and natural sciences, then
acquire users in the humanities.

7. Competitive Analysis
• Bibliography makers like EasyBib, BibMe,
CitationMachine, CiteThisForMe, etc do make the
process of accessing the content of other users’
bibliographies fast and easy
• Librarians (Not always accessible)
• Professors (Not always willing to help with the first
steps of a research project.)

8. “Team”
Jason D. Rowley
Created this deck in 20 minutes
5+ years experience with
frustrating academic research
projects.
Will provide help to anyone who
wants to build this thing.

9. Key Performance Indicators
• Someone wanting to build this.

10. Current Status // Funding
• Worked on this project for literally 20 minutes.
• “Idea Stage”
• No prototype
• No wireframes
• No devs working on the project at this time
• No investment interest
• No significant interest from its creator, either, tbh.