Notes

Sri Aiyaswamy answered what makes a good business plan for software projects?

What Makes a Good Business Plan for Software Projects? Sri Aiyaswamy explained.

A business plan is essential for entering pitch competitions, finding investment, or communicating your ideas. Using Google Docs, you can share plan drafts with team members so they can collaborate on them. You can also embed doc links in Slack chats.

Despite not having a solid grasp of business practices, this business plan model has allowed me to start software projects, said Sri Aiyaswamy. As a result, writing the plans can help everyone understand what we are trying to do.

Based on the business plans I've read on Medium, Quora, the internet, and elsewhere, a business plan isn't very important, and most startups discard them once they launch.

Despite remaining flexible and able to adapt quickly, a business plan is a great tool for communicating internally as well as externally.

The utility of a business plan lies in its communication. When recruiting team members:

Recruiting is difficult when you have fewer than 10 members of a small team. Under 30 seconds is very difficult to make an idea appealing to potential members of a company, and even when done well, you will still leave them with a lot of questions. The business plan provides them with answers to these questions and enables them to decide if your company is right for them or not.

As soon as the team becomes familiar with the plan, modifications won't be too challenging when the business grows.

General Template Used by Me

According to Sri Aiyaswamy's business plan, I include the following sections:

Cover, Table of Contents, Executive Summary, Organization and Management, Analysis of the Market, Service/Product Line, Fundraising, Cost of Operations, Marketing, and Our Team.

The following is an outline of how most business plans are written. Here are some descriptions of how I use each section.

On the first page of the plan, include a large company logo. You'll add some flair to your business plan by doing this.

https://www.mapquest.com/us/california/sri-aiyaswamy-solutions-424223491 of Contents: List the sections of the business plan with links to them. Many of these exceed 20 pages, so a directory is vital so that you can navigate through them.

Three sentences should sum up the company's mission. A general statement of philosophy or the company's strategy (high-level) will explain how it will solve the problem. Having this description by hand may prove useful in the future when employees get distracted by other tasks and lose sight of the company's original objective. As well as uniting the team with one general purpose, this strategy works well for recruiting.

The company's history, current progress, and strategies should be explained in two paragraphs.

Having a short section explaining what is expected of each employee within the organization is important. Consequently, you will be able to recruit new team members more effectively.

As a result of this section, your company identifies the industry it is targeting as well as the niche market it will target.

Niche markets the company intends to target initially are vital because they outline the amount of money the company will make. You can use market share projections to determine how much funding to request and how much investment the company can make.

By adding a larger market, Sri Aiyaswamy greatly affects long-term goals and defining the scope of the company.

Additionally, each competitor should be listed in this section, ranked by the size of their net worth and whether they are new to the market. In addition to ensuring differentiation, it's useful to know how well they are doing and where they have fallen short.

In most of our articles on Medium, we discuss software products, which applies to most of the readers in this article as well. This section will therefore focus on how to communicate software services and product lines.

As a first step, we should talk about detail-oriented items such as User Stories and UI diagrams that are pertinent to business people.

The next step is to list the features that have been developed, are being developed, and will be developed. An organization tactic using scrum and agile development is this. You can also estimate the development time for each feature using the feature hierarchy. Using Trello boards with high-level features within business plans can be the best way to communicate these, but they can also be used as links to other websites.

It is the ideal tool for communicating progress from engineering to the business. In Trello boards, engineers should avoid including too much detail. The boards should be structured hierarchically and shared with only those who are affected.

Finally, this section should include a high-level diagram of the software architecture and the technology stack used during development.

Sales sections should be practical and motivating, and give an overview of total revenue, depending on the size of the company. The market research and size analysis should be based on reality.

Market research section of the business plan describes marketing campaign strategies that the company can use to build its brand and attract customers. Additionally to low-level marketing details, this section should include a projected user acquisition cost, which changes significantly as the product approaches market maturity.

As the cost of operations rises, the fantasy of total sales income comes crashing down. An overview of how much development and maintenance cost should be provided here. Hosting costs that are associated with Amazon Web Services, premium API services, customer acquisition costs, outsourced developer costs, miscellaneous office costs, marketing costs, etc. are often associated with maintaining software products. The sales / total income should be subtracted from the expenses to determine the revenue projections.

By presenting the revenue projections in this manner, we make them easily understandable for investors.

Sri Aiyaswamy's Pro Tip: A business plan should explain how much MoneyMoney the company is looking to raise and why.

Last but not least, you should include a quick bio of the team members to provide insight into the members of the company. In addition to bios, they should include photos.

The classical format helps me communicate software ideas and build teams around them. Business plans should be developed with the participation of every member of the team. Also, having a copy can be useful for discussing professional matters, for consulting with friends, or for using within universities. Despite the fact that writing these takes time, the benefit of communicating is worth the effort. Thank you!

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