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Serious question... how big do you guys want us to go?
There's going to be arguments for and against any targets you chose or that are suggested. Small is easy, but lacks ambition. Giant is ballsy, but failure could sink you totally.Set different targets - minimum, reasonable (with hard work), and stretch.
Work out what you need to achieve each.
Identify what the barriers are*. Workshop ideas on how to break those barriers down**.
Have a plan for getting there - what is the cost, who are the people, how much time. What level of quality.
- e.g. Your lack of time to develop all of the features that you want
** For the example above - a good SDLC, a solid prioritisation framework, covering people, process & technology,
- e.g. Your lack of time to develop all of the features that you want
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..keys to a ford granada 2.8 with vinyl roof trim..
but, if you posted up your business plan we could see if an aspiration to go large is credible. or will this be part of the seedrs pack?
We have a pitch deck, not a business plan.
The pitch deck has numbers, they were based on us hedging our position instead of pushing hard and going hard.
Business plans tend not to exist for startups because of a simple reason: They're usually nothing more than an unusually obscure form of science fiction.
Business plans make total sense when the business and all of it's attributes are known factors.
If you open a restaurant it's well understood what the industry standards are for table occupancy, the cost to acquire a customer, the cost of the food, the established costs of serving the customer, the prices the market can bear, the footfall in a particular area, the style of food liked by various demographics.
Business plans make perfect sense for every type of business that can borrow on a debt basis from High St Banks. This is actually 80% of the UK market... known models, and the plan proves you know the model.
Where the business plan falls down is when all of the variables become unknown, when you are attempting to enter a market where your ability to reach it is unproven, where you may be creating an entirely new market, when your product forges into an area that other companies haven't gone.
For those businesses the accepted rule is to test early, learn quickly, and adapt. That's the essence of the Lean Startup movement, and the whole idea of the startup "pivot".
The vast majority of VCs and investors understand that the idea as it is originally may not be the one you eventually succeed with, and that the original market you aim at may not be the one that you eventually serve.
As such, the business plan is very much considered to be absolute fiction, a waste of time.
Instead, investors will do what they have been doing to us... they'll make intros with industry experts and have them tear us a new one and test the fundamental proposition. If you've watched the penultimate episode of "The Apprentice" you'll know what this looks like.
It's been those meetings that have really revealed to us how strong a proposition we have, how well we understand it. And it's those meetings that are leading large investors to have started to say "Shut up and take my money". And it's all of that which is leading to our increased belief that if we're hitting those buttons we must be doing something right.
I am very happy to share the numbers we have, which were hedged towards a safe and steady growth with reduced risk... but we're very much leaning towards "What if we were aggressive on the sales and customer acquisition... what if we tried to reach existing forums rather than grow as they came to us?".
If you would like to see the pitch deck, then email me at david@microcosm.cc and I will send you a copy.
But note: The numbers will now be revised for a much heavier emphasis on sales, and supporting that. Hence, they will be ramped up a lot higher and a lot sooner, but at far greater costs (all those sales and marketing people we'd have to hire).
A pitch deck is as close to a business plan that a startup has.
As for Seedrs... their game is to normalise these pitches, and thus they have their own form and the pitch deck that we have does not fit it. But I can respond to a Q&A once it is live and share the pitch deck there, that's apparently a way around the structure of their proposal.
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Ok so this is the way I am thinking about a possible investment. Its high risk and therefore needs to have the potential to deliver high rewards - to deliver those rewards you probably need to aim big.
If you stay conservative in your approach, the margins between delivering a viable business and failing are small,. Conversely if you go for the big vision "We are going to control 90% of the widget market" and the end result is you control 25% of the widget market, you haven't reached your goal but you have dleivered a viable business. So I think aiming big widens the range of non-failure outcomes for Microco.sm - beneficial for you and your investors.
The difficult bit is that if you aim big, the investment thesis has to be credible to grumpy due diligence professionals like me.
So if you can substantiate the big vision and show comparables / market research / whatever else that supports going big, I would do it.
A great way of putting it all, and echoes why we are now firmly of the mind to shoot for as big as possible with acceptance of the grey hairs from greater risk.
The difficult bit is apparently not that difficult, the VCs and seed investors seem frustrated that we haven't already taken their money. One yesterday said we're "on fire", another applauded the approach and depth of understanding, and they all are getting itchy that we haven't let them in yet.
The truth is, we didn't feel ready, and felt we had to do more and prove more traction. But they believe we have identified a big and strong market, that we have the product vision, and that the missing bits are all things that can be bought in: sales and marketing.
Those investors all accept the risk, and their due diligence is the meetings, the validation from peers, and then the actual technical and business due diligence that follows is far more a "they aren't bullshitting are they?" thing which we'd pass fine.
Going big is what we're now about.
As in, we deeply and truly now believe it, whereas 18 months ago it was a pipedream and achieving a few million turnover a year would've been enough. Now we're thinking about how quick we could go past that.
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Well we were already think "a couple of % of the market would be HUGE!" and now we're thinking "there really is no reason not to go for a double digit % or even be thinking in terms of the larger fractions: 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, etc".
But the difference between the two dictates a lot of cost, which frankly the VCs would gleefully take part in providing the numbers happen.
As we were: Sticky engine of growth, spread slowly and controllably.
As we now are: Paid (acquisition) and sticky (retention) engine of growth, spread fast and at times uncontrollably (struggle to keep up with sales).
http://larslofgren.com/marketingbasics/the-three-engines-of-growth-with-eric-ries
That paid stuff... mostly that means community managers trained in sales to help explain the benefits of Microcosm to them and their communities, and then supporting the on-boarding (import) of their community.
That's fairly time-consuming stuff, and so the costs would be quite significant.... about 4 times those we were predicting. But... the upsides are also significant, with projections of growth at least 3 times what we were predicting. The impact on revenue of that gets us to a pretty big company in 5 years, rather than a modest company in 5 years.
And that's without trying to factor in weird and unpredictable stuff (like any viral effect of other forums users migrating because their forums are shite).
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People will come!
Field of Dreams (5/9) Movie CLIP - People Will Come (1989) HD - YouTube
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I'll assume you guys have researched the break down of interests in general and applied that to the graphic. I am naturally reading left to right/most popular first.
knitting/fishing/music/watches/cycling/cars/games
I appreciate that the graphical representation of 'interests' might be problematic, but surely cycling is the most popular interest in the world?
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massive apologies for fixing this for you
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No need for a business plan as such, but what are your vision, mission and (immediate) objective respectively?
Let's define something first, when I say "interests" I mean stuff that people collectively care about, which tends to be hobbies and pastimes, but is basically comprised of one or more of "topic", "location", and potentially "time"... for LFGSS the topic is "fixed and single-speed cycling" and the location is "London, UK" and there isn't a time element applied.
So interests can well be just a place, such as a village group, and it could well be just a topic, such as knitting (globally), and it could well be a purely time based thing, such as the millenium event.
But to generalise, people don't generalise. If you ask someone to describe themselves they don't start by saying "Well I'm human", they might start by saying "I'm into road cycling and belong to a club in Twickenham". That is... people use specificity to identify themselves as different, and interest groups, that is communities, tend to form when the specificity is narrow enough to not actually end up being too large a crowd.
Got it? People self-organise into communities around niche interests. In fact, the more niche the stronger the community.
And that's what we're going on about when we use the word interest, and when we speak of communities. It's not just cycling, this is but the tip of the iceberg that comes from a glacier that is huge. LFGSS is but a speck of dust.
With definitions dealt with... and we've gone through this a few times and the answers change in words but never in meaning.
Vision: A world where people come together around their interests, and can pursue them with a fever, with the enthusiastic support of others.
We want to help you find people who share your passions, and for you to nerd out excitedly and thus help you explore whatever you're into even more.
You shouldn't find it difficult, you should be able to find people who share your passions no matter how far they are from your geographic location or social network. The childhood mantra of "follow your dreams" should be encouraged into adulthoods, and we should help people be excited about applying themselves to the stuff they love and sharing it.
I really love seeing people light up and get excited about the thing that rocks their world. Take one of us on a bad day and get us talking about the best ride we've had, and our love of bikes, and the strength of bond we share with other cyclists... you'll see what I mean.
Mission: To help people come together around their interests and to explore them together. To overcome all barriers that prevent these communities forming and sticking together.
That's the essence... we've got to push all the technical stuff out of the way and make it really easy to discover what you're into, to discover other people into the same stuff, and then give you a space in which you can nerd out and become experts in those areas.
We're smart fucks, let us do the tech, and you and everyone else can focus on just being into whatever you're into.
Values: Communities should be open, welcoming, trusted, supportive and forgiving, and the community comes before the individuals.
We need to make sure you can find stuff, we need to help individuals join and make communities vibrant, so we really encourage openness and public information. A bit like the difference between chifg.com and lfgss.com . And when we've got people together, well people will always take care of themselves, but communities do good and so we need to make sure we (collectively, everyone) take care of the communities first.
That trusted thing... the monetisation should never corrode that. You shouldn't be in the place of reading a games magazine and wondering why all reviews are between 80 and 95% because they've effectively been bought by advertisers. So we have to balance that as we go along, money will eventually matter a lot, but never at the expense of trust within a community.
Objective: We go for growth.
Bringing on board medium sized communities (250 > 5,000 members) to form a critical mass of strong interests that can drive us to an inflexion point and act as a gravity to pull all interests and groups/communities to us.
Well... you did ask.
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LFGSS is but a speck of stardust.
ftfy -
To help people come together around their interests and to explore them together. To overcome all barriers that prevent these communities forming and sticking together.
tl:dr
Need simpler strapline that doesn't mention other companies like, you know, tumblr.
Example:
Doodle simplifies straplines
Nick it?
(microcosm simplifies communities)
NotThamesWater
deleted
dst2
danb
wvm
Lynchman
fatoldbloke
bothwell
branwen
skydancer
mashton-
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About
Microcosm - 2nd Seedrs crowd-funding round
Posted by
@Velocio
Ok so this is the way I am thinking about a possible investment. Its high risk and therefore needs to have the potential to deliver high rewards - to deliver those rewards you probably need to aim big.
If you stay conservative in your approach, the margins between delivering a viable business and failing are small,. Conversely if you go for the big vision "We are going to control 90% of the widget market" and the end result is you control 25% of the widget market, you haven't reached your goal but you have dleivered a viable business. So I think aiming big widens the range of non-failure outcomes for Microco.sm - beneficial for you and your investors.
The difficult bit is that if you aim big, the investment thesis has to be credible to grumpy due diligence professionals like me.
So if you can substantiate the big vision and show comparables / market research / whatever else that supports going big, I would do it.