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.

UIDAI and Mobile

I tried to google this topic and found very little information on the prospects of future of UIDAI(Unique Identification Authority of India) with mobile technology as one of it's propagators. So I thought of bringing my thoughts to notice and pen down what all can be done with the amalgamation of these business jargons in India in future. As per the latest numbers 2 million numbers have already been provided and 1 million per day is the target w.e.f 1st oct. Doing simple maths it will take another 3.5 years to cover present population of 1.25 billion which by the end of this time would cover every inch of land available on earth.  Highly unrealistic, a herculean task for Mr. Nilekani and co, but I won't go into criticizing columnist mode but instead will focus on my key topic here.

Needless to say, this project if succeeds will bring about a reform in the processes- ranging from reducing paper work, fast services for individual verification, easy access to bank accounts, reduction in corruption, ease of polling and linkages with social welfare schemes such as NREGA esp for rural areas. Though getting a UID number is not a mandate but certainly it will help individuals ranging from people living in remote areas to HNI's. You can do a bank transactions or open a completely new account using your mobile verifying your thumb impressions or iris verification. Currently National Payments Corporation of India(NPCI) is working with UIDAI to provide hassle free transactions on mobile without even showing up to the bank. A mobile app can be built which takes thumb impression of a person, authenticate the details with entries at the backend and allow user to create a new account with the bank of his or her choice ! 

Thumb impression on Mobile

Linking mobile numbers to UIDAI will allow wallet-less wandering anywhere around the country. All your details such as Licence, PAN, VoterID, bank accounts, credit cards can be accessed directly from your mobile with the simple verification of UIDAI. Ofcourse, that goes without saying that one needs to develop a highly robust system and network around mobile, which can be leveraged by customers to access their personal information and consume it in a right manner.  More so, the telecom operators along with government should channelize their energies here rather than spending time, money and efforts on passing allegations to each other and should gear up and develop a strong network that can sustain the traffic of this order. Then be it e-ticket verification for train or Air or Roll number verification in an exam centre, all will benefit from the fusion of these two: UIDAI and mobile.