The Timeline and Business Plan

Posted by admin | Sourcing engineers to build our product »

After the rigorous rounds of investment pitches and meetings, you’ll be quite releaved when the investment is finally secured. So, when the money is in the bank, you can proceed with locking down all of the other components of the launch that you need confirmed before you can define a time line upon which everything else you do will depend.

Your timeline to launch should have all of the different aspects of development, marketing and sales planned out. You can build separate timelines and schedules for these different components if you want. These timelines will then have to be set in stone and followed as stringently as possible for you to be able to launch in time and on schedule. This usually requires an iron-will and exceptionally good management skills - so you should start sharpening both of these elements of your personality.

Have a marketing timeline showing what mediums will used when. Usually its good to build credibility and trust in the consumers first - so you can plan the initial schedule for building those. When you’re closer to launch, you can go through hype cycles and excitement peaks and then post-launch relaunches. All of these need to be marked on a calendar or pointed out in a timeline.

The most important thing, without which you can not launch, is your product. So, make sure that you plan out the product development schedule properly after going over the specs and modules with your technical team and architects.

Our Events Listed product is already in the testing phase right now - so we’re in a good position to finalize the launch details. I like to fix dates for prelaunch campaign starts and for a massive launch phase that will hopefully last more than 2 weeks of heavy promotion. Everything will revolve around these launch dates.

At the end of this phase you should have a business plan that includes marketing plan as as well as development schedules. All of this information and strategies can be plotted on mindmaps and time lines and be accessible for the team to see. You have to make sure that everyone is on the same page at all times. Our Internal Business plan was written in text first, then the content was plotted into mindmaps and a timeline.

The initial written plan touched on the following aspects of our plans;

* a detailed description about the product Events Listed and how it could benefit customers.

* a list of product features and the elements that make it unique

* a detailed strategy behind the idea conception and product dynamics

* a description of the market size based on our initial research and findings

* our marketing and outreach plans, and how we will utilize social media networks for promotions

* our product launch strategy and overall timelines

* legal considerations - to show that we have all grounds covered.

* our revenue expectations from the venture

* our overall business and revenue distribution model.

* the organizational structure of our team to showcase our strengths

* a list of our targeted milestones and dates based on the timelines that we had earlier built

* our exit strategy

We take the information generated within this plan and and use it to draw up time lines & we mind map an overview of the big picture with different sub-sections and divisions for detailed information. Mindmaps are a great way of organizing complex plans in an easy to read manner. We usually put up our plans online in password protected web services so that my team can access the info form anywhere.

Its worth mentioning here some truths about business. Inevitably things change, and as they do we change our mindmaps and our timelines along with it, so that they are uptodate. The process of writing the business plan is the most important element of the plan because it forces us to do due diligence on every aspect of the opportunity.

Once we transport this content into our online mediums that are easy changed and followed the initial written source is archived for the records. Its always a good exercise to pull it out each year down the track to see how much we variate off the initial plan.


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