In my last post I talked about how I pitched my team the CapitalCents idea. Having three other very smart, hungry and determined fellow MBA students to help me get my idea off the ground was a wonderful stroke of good fortune. Not only where they willing to help me but they had incentive in the form of a grade for our work! Our goal was to create a marketing plan, if you have never created a marketing plan, I'll go into some detail as to what that is.
Of course any good business/marketing plan should open with an executive summary. So to check that box we did just that, and the next section was situational analysis. The situational analysis section was why we were discussed why this could be a viable business opportunity, where did the idea come from, what PAIN were we trying to solve (this is very important) and what is the business? Then we covered Market Needs and Trends where we again talk about the hole we think we have identified in the market and why this business is moving in that direction. The SWOT analysis is where we identify our Strengths (what advantages and strengths you will have our potential competition), Weaknesses (take a hard look in the mirror on these, I know it will be difficult), Opportunities (for our business and the market), and Threats (would could potentially come up and clean our clock). Our next section was competition, please do not be so naive as to believe you have none, trust me you have some kind of competition. So make sure you are careful to outline who could create problems for your potential business. Your target market is of utmost importance, make sure you know exactly who will both use your product and who you want to sell it too. Be very specific are you targeting 50-75 year old retired females or 21-28 young, career oriented, and a college graduate. We really dug into our target market to make sure we knew who to market and build the site for. The mission, direction and objectives section is worthy of being broken out into greater detail. We had very specific marketing objectives, financial objectives, and a customer service objective. Moving on we had a Product Strategy section, this section outlines what features we want our product to have to give us the best chance at success. Keep in mind you may not be able to afford everything initially but you will be well positioned to make some very informed decisions if you have everything laid out in front of you. At least in this position you are not shooting completely from the hip! Other sections to include is your pricing and promotion strategy, you maybe thinking at this point "we are covering the same things over and over"; I disagree you are looking at potential problems and solutions from different angles. This will only help your business get off on the right foot. Next we looked at some very basic marketing research and used it to strengthen our position. The next section was Financials and Forecasts, I will go into great detail in future posts about how I would recommend you go about doing this. We included in this section a summary of our forecasted growth rate, registered users, ad clicks, page views; pulling it all together to get a 30,000 foot level view of this business being profitable, it was and that was our marketing plan. There maybe a few other small sections I missed but this will get you off to a really good start.
Pulling all this information together was very difficult it was by far the biggest project we have done in school and I encourage you to find potential partners to help you. Staying focused in this stage is very important and do not underestimate a good marketing plan before going to market.
I was very nervous to present this to the class and the results were very good and encouraging. Looking in the face of 40 other MBA students and sharing a dream and a vision was a very nerve racking thing to do and if you don't have a class full of MBAs I'd recommend finding an independent group of people who will tell you truth.
At this point I had enough information and confidence to go into full on sprint or well maybe jog. I was armed and dangerous.
Next up writing the dreaded RFP, after all I didn't know anything about creating a website.

So go check out CapitalCents and let me know what you think!