Spec for Business Case

Spec for Customer Discovery Spec for Business Case Spec for Marketing Spec for Product or Service

Topics covered in this report

General Specifications for the four Final Papers

IT IS OF ULTIMATE IMPORTANCE That the four students are working on one and the same product. That there is true alignment and disagreements are worked out in converation. Note that much of the work is done by all members of the team. It is just the specific writing of the report on the work is done by one of the four students.

• Each team will be writing four short papers as a final deliverable
• Each paper will stand on its own, written by one student with consultation and review by the others
• Each paper will have a logical flow, with a brief introduction and conclusion (and without a title page)
• Each paper should target between 4 and 6 pages, counting images. This is not a hard limit but longer is definitely not necessarily better (“If I had more time I could have made it shorter”)
• All four papers will have a consistent look in terms of fonts, titles, sections

Details

This paper is about the business side. It will look at competitors, pricing, business model and overall financial plan. It is sritten in three drafts, stage 1, 2 and Final. It will be owned by a single student (but input and collaboration from the team.)

Growth

What is your engine of growth? What techniques will likely work to achieve growth and make your business sustainable? Remember that as an entrepreneur you are only successful when your impact on the world increases from your starting point. If your project is about delivering blankets to homeless in Boston, how do you now think about having the same impact in Waltham? Or Providence? Or in 100 cities around the USA? If your project is a two sided marketplace in one geography, for one segment, or for one type of service, then how do you grow the initial market places, or how to you add geographies or segments or services?

The detailed marketing tactics to achieve growth belong in the Marketing document. For the business mode, focus on the costs and estimated impact of these tactics on the business model? Consider your startup phase and your growth phase. Consider material, service, and especially people costs. Also think about the intimate connection of your costs with your growth models.

Pricing Model and Approaches

We will talk a lot about pricing. You will have tested pricing ideas, AS HYPOTHESES in your MVPs. And you should do the spreadsheet modeling to show that you have an understanding of the impact of your pricing on the overall finances of your business.

What approach to capturing revenue is right for your product? Who are the users vs. the customers? Is this a two sided market? Who pays? Who gets paid?

Financial Model

Provide a basic financial model and/or forecast. Remember to work out the costs for delivering your product or service, its relationship to the number of customers.

Milestones

It’s reasonable to consider several “milestones” where the assumptions change. Typical milestones might be: First real user; First paying customer. etc. The milestones often correspond to a point in time when you would seek additional funding.

Generally it’s not useful to show more than 2 years in months. Of course we understand that this is just a common-sense forecast that is well reasoned but certainly will depend on guesses on key unknowns.

Financial Requirements

This ties together the financial model and the milestones. The amount of funds raised to finance is tied to what the planned use of the funds is. Ideally the first funding will be enough for the company to come to a point in its evolution that will justify another round of funds.

In other words, you don’t want to run out of funds when you are in the middle of finishing the first release. Better to plan that your first round of funds will take you to, for example, first 100 users, or first paying user, or product accepted into the app store.