Lessons Learned - Week 12
No Business Plan survives the first contact with their clients. However, after this 6 month period of hypothesize – test – adapt Business Model process, ours will survive!
What kind of information should our Business Plan include?
It should start with an Executive Summary such as who reads it gets a comprehensive overview of LeadTeam.
Then, we need to identify our vision, mission and values – this is our essence, it is essential to define who LeadTeam is and what does it want to reach. Why do we exist? It was the first time we thought concretely about this, but it came out extremely natural, as, despite not written, we all knew what LeadTeam was.
A one-year objective will give the investors a perceptions of where do we want to be in the short-term. In our case we focused on the number of users and Universities we will serve, as this is a measure of how close we are to our mission and vision. Moreover, these two metrics are highly related with our costs (variable cost structure) and revenues – our overall performance.
Knowing this we started presenting our customer segments and how we would create value to each. Here we used many of the conclusions we reached with our testing. For instance, when describing University Students we knew exactly their main problems and how they currently solved these problems (what platforms they used for example). On the other hand, we tried to transmit our Value Proposition through comprehensive images. For instance, what kind of processes are we automating? Why is this important to this customer segment?
After explaining how we will make money (Revenue Model) the different LeadTeam editions (LeadTeam free, premium and universities) as well as the different distribution channels (LeadTeam Desktop, App, Tablet and Facebook) we focused on our Marketing Plan. We decided to focus on the three main steps: Getting, Keeping and Growing Customers. How will we do this? Why is it going to work? What do we have so far (how many students did we reach)?
Then, we explained our main decisions in how LeadTeam is functioning, in such a way our Value Proposition will be fully delivered.
The Financial Analysis takes an important role, so investors can understand exactly how much return should they expect from their investment. This made us focus not only on cost structure and revenue foreecast, but also in analysing the IRR and Breakeven point.
At this point it becomes essential to understand in what kind of environment we are moving. Is this a growing market? Does it have a lot of potential? Who are our competitors and how are we surpassing them? In the value curve we focused on projecting only 3 competitors: Moodle, Facebook and Cloud Services. However, we did a thorough comparison of all our main competitors (strengths and weakness divided in different attributes), which we included in the appendix.
Then, how will we implement our project? What are the main milestones and calendar? This is important, so that investors understand what to expect and what kind of targets and objectives do we have!
Finally, what kind of risks are we facing, what are our main strengths and weakness, how we are resolving them and mitigating.
What kind of information should our Business Plan include?
It should start with an Executive Summary such as who reads it gets a comprehensive overview of LeadTeam.
Then, we need to identify our vision, mission and values – this is our essence, it is essential to define who LeadTeam is and what does it want to reach. Why do we exist? It was the first time we thought concretely about this, but it came out extremely natural, as, despite not written, we all knew what LeadTeam was.
A one-year objective will give the investors a perceptions of where do we want to be in the short-term. In our case we focused on the number of users and Universities we will serve, as this is a measure of how close we are to our mission and vision. Moreover, these two metrics are highly related with our costs (variable cost structure) and revenues – our overall performance.
Knowing this we started presenting our customer segments and how we would create value to each. Here we used many of the conclusions we reached with our testing. For instance, when describing University Students we knew exactly their main problems and how they currently solved these problems (what platforms they used for example). On the other hand, we tried to transmit our Value Proposition through comprehensive images. For instance, what kind of processes are we automating? Why is this important to this customer segment?
After explaining how we will make money (Revenue Model) the different LeadTeam editions (LeadTeam free, premium and universities) as well as the different distribution channels (LeadTeam Desktop, App, Tablet and Facebook) we focused on our Marketing Plan. We decided to focus on the three main steps: Getting, Keeping and Growing Customers. How will we do this? Why is it going to work? What do we have so far (how many students did we reach)?
Then, we explained our main decisions in how LeadTeam is functioning, in such a way our Value Proposition will be fully delivered.
The Financial Analysis takes an important role, so investors can understand exactly how much return should they expect from their investment. This made us focus not only on cost structure and revenue foreecast, but also in analysing the IRR and Breakeven point.
At this point it becomes essential to understand in what kind of environment we are moving. Is this a growing market? Does it have a lot of potential? Who are our competitors and how are we surpassing them? In the value curve we focused on projecting only 3 competitors: Moodle, Facebook and Cloud Services. However, we did a thorough comparison of all our main competitors (strengths and weakness divided in different attributes), which we included in the appendix.
Then, how will we implement our project? What are the main milestones and calendar? This is important, so that investors understand what to expect and what kind of targets and objectives do we have!
Finally, what kind of risks are we facing, what are our main strengths and weakness, how we are resolving them and mitigating.