Writing a Business Plan

Recently, I wrote my first business plan for a b-school competition. Entries were invited on opportunities thrown open by Aadhar and how to tap these opportunities in our business models today. As soon as I saw this article, I thought of giving it a try and spared two sleepless nights to complete my entry as I already had asked for extension of deadline. I know most of the people have ideas but very few go on to build a company out of it. Though I belong to the former group till date, but I want to share my experience of writing a business plan and invite people to share their thoughts and ideas on the same.

Since Aadhar is still in it's conception stage, I collected all the necessary information available on the web and jotted down everything in one folder in my laptop. If you want to read more about UIDAI, go through my blogpost here. I sat down with one of my colleagues and discussed at length all the pros and cons of the technology involved. At the end of the discussion we had couple of ideas. We selected the one which sounded feasible and would be easy to implement given the time constraints and available resources.

Few things we kept in mind before writing down the plan were to identify our target customers, the business problem we are trying to solve, any competition that exist in the market today for our proposed solution and how different are we and what are the limitations in existing solution that we are trying to solve with our solution. We started down by opening a google document which we both can edit at the same time.

The school did provide us the template which we need to adhere to, but in broader terms every business plan template is more or less are similar except few points here and there. We started with writing the summary in 100 words that was to be used to pitch our idea in front of judges. We mentioned two key things here : 1) what we are proposing 2) problem statement: why we are proposing. I think, as this is a starting point and most of the applications are rejected/accepted on basis of understanding of this point we tried to focus more on this space. We continued to write our background details, our target customer and market, discussed why our solution is unique, talked about competitors, the limitations in their solution and how we have an edge over them.

We also mentioned what product/service we are offering, and what would be the pricing mechanism, and why the customer will be really interested in buying our solution. We tried to relate our proposals with real life examples, so that it becomes easy for the reader to understand our thought process.  In the end, we mentioned how do we plan to execute our solution with rough estimates of time duration, what type of resources are required including talent and manpower.

I don't know why after completing this task, I got huge contentment and a boost to self ego. Maybe starting a company of your own and nurturing it like your own child  must give whole lot of contentment to an entrepreneur which makes him travel that extra mile to create an impact on this world. No matter what the result might be, it's certainly a step towards something good to come.

The Social Technology

Recently, I was going through emerging trends report published by Gartner on their website and my eyes were struck on one point viz. Technology and social trends. I decided immediately that this would be the next topic for my blog.

Needless to mention with 700 million users worldwide and with over 4% of photos ever clicked stored in their database, Facebook is the Don of social networking web world. This title would not have been possible without the excellent management skills and charisma of Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. Handling diverse users without the slightest of hitch is a job well done. One may wonder what is so great about social networking and how can this be of any advantage other than general chit chat and viewing videos and images?

The answer lies within the question itself i.e. networking. This whole concept is a blessing in disguise for many small scale businesses which were finding hard to reach out to their customers. It is slowly becoming a mass media communication technique adopted by startups to reach out to the public domain. And why not as no other technology connects 700 million people worldwide at one place and that too free of cost. Businesses ranging from selling unique hand made interior decoration stuff to heavy machinery based fashion garments don't hesitate to give few bucks to reach out to target customers across the globe.Social networking websites have tapped this ideology to monetize their workflows that connect businesses with cross geographical consumers.

Another thing that is gaining momentum is social collaboration through blogging, instant messaging, collaborative offices and crowd sourcing. Companies find blogging  a nice way to advertise their products and reaching out to the public. They don't mind paying few bucks to some eminent bloggers who can once in a while advertise their products. Moreover every company today has its own blogging site from where it can get in touch with it's customers. Any concerns, feedbacks, suggestions, new product launch, it's feature details and future upgrades are shared using this mechanism which provides a two way interaction interface both for consumers and the producer.

Last but not the least, Social feedback is a very powerful tool to gather feedbacks, opinions and general interest of the public on specific items as seen on youtube, flickr, Digg, del.icio.us and amazon. This is also a mechanism to know and understand what the end-user wants and companies can use the feedback to differentiate their products from others. The invention of "Like" and "+1" is seen as a breakthrough in the field of social networking and as a way to read people's mind- to know about their liking. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy. 


Lastly, I want to dedicate this blog post to my favorite tech icon Mr. Steve Jobs without the inspiration of whom,  the mobile technology and related segments wouldn't have sounded so interesting and meaningful.