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Category: Business plan

Trying to make sense of my world

Trying hard to make sense ???? Techcelerate Group includes: Techcelerate SkilledUp Life, previously incubated by Techcelerate Labs Techcelerate Labs Techcelerate Labs include: Deal Lite Progress Hero with Andrew Threlfall Leaderboard built 100% by SkilledUp Lifers and many more Sadly our Twitter App is buggered – Free API cancelled by Elon! I’ve not yet succeeded in building sales teams. Need to crack this! See you tomorrow morning https://lnkd.in/e_Uwdb3d

My latest #GetMeOutOfHere strategy

This is how I feel… I was born to do more. Yet I don’t have all the right tools to achieve it. So I must persevere.  So how am I going to persevere? Life’s passion – building technology companies. Helping others – helping other tech entrepreneurs grow their tech businesses through strategy, partnerships, integrations and more (do read on). Get a job – permanent, contract or interim. I have accumulated 15,000 contacts since 2004 (the year I started my tech entrepreneur journey). 5,000 of those are on Linkedin. Business friends see my networking abilities as my greatest USP. “To say we go back long…

My 2017 Plan

Unlike the 2016 plan, my 2017 plan has multi-focus. In 2016, it was about singular focus. In 2017, this will change to: UnifiedVU – Continue to build the company. Venture 9 – Advisory and consultancy services to software development delivered not just by me, but bringing specific talent from my close network.

Template for a simplified investor pitch deck

I’ve been speaking to Paul Rawlings, a Manchester based tech entrepreneur and Techcelerate Member, quite a lot these days to simplify our story and thought of sharing what we came up with.   Cover slide – logo, who you are and what your business is in one short sentence. Background – in my case, ran few technology businesses, sold few and had a problem. MVP – Built the MVP and this is what it looks like. Solution – This is how it solves the problem, which is better than how it was solved by others before. Customer development – Found few…

My Kick-Ass Ninja Team with Permission Kick My Arse

I like to think I am the king of crowdsourcing (if not the king, at least good at it). edocr.com remained a going concern thanks to the help I received from many individuals from Andy Yelland to Alex Goldstone and Stuart Scott-Goldstone. This time I want to take this to another level. I’ve appointed a kick-ass Ninja team with permission to kick my butt. I could have called them advisors. In my book, advisors are those who are excellent at preaching (from their experience of course), but not always ready to fold their shirt sleeves and get into nitty gritty of…

Scaling pre-maturely is a killer for startups

Scaling pre-maturely is a killer for startups. So why am I doing it? 1. Its about planting seeds for the long run 2. Get me to think about scaling On the negative side, its a big distraction to immediate revenues Two weeks ago, we started our distribution channel, with Xero Accountants and in future with Google Apps Resellers This week we started our developer channel, limiting to product vendors only. We thought we had 3 interested parties. Just now, one of them want to take us in a different direction that we are not quite ready for. But it makes…

UnifiedVU Progress Update

Just a quick update on progress of my latest tech startup, UnifiedVU (this is more of a note to myself than anything else): The Pre-Start: 2014 Nov – Idea agreed with Phil Brown and left Causeway/Livestax 2014 Dec – Company incorporated Break 2015 Jan – Approached by Accusoft to acquire edocr. Focus shift to edocr 2015 Mar – Deal done. Only team member seconded to edocr/Accusoft. Development comes to a stop immediately Re-Start 2015 July – re-grouped and extend the team to 3 2015 Q4 – Customer development, both SMBs and enterprise, whilst product development is progressing. 2016 Jan –…

Emotional Day!

Just got back home from two days of discussing strategy and commercialisation of Livestax with the full team and facilitators. We covered an amazing amount of work, got to know the strengths and weaknesses of the team much better than ever before. It has taken over 3 years since Phil Brown of Causeway Technologies and Ross Alderson of Powershift Media came up with the concept. We are finally getting closer to the public release of V2 of Livestax (V1 was launched inside Causeway in Jan 2014). It was also an emotional day as I requested to become a partner to Livestax…

Business Plan #2 – The Team

Many investors will bet on the team than the product or the market opportunity. So what is the ideal startup team? According to Mark Suster, its 5 software engineers and a CEO. But edocr.com is now 3 years old, yet it has no full-time employees. What it has is a team, made up of freelancers and contractors. This arrangement has helped us to bootstrap, but we now need a major rethink on how we can grow as a business, in terms of market share, revenues, product and people. In terms of writing the business plan for edocr.com, I have chosen…

Business plan #1 – Starting point

There are many ways to write a business plan. But how do you start the process? You could start by thinking of: Product – Where would you like to see the product in 18 months? Sales – How much revenues would you like to generate in 5 years time? Market – How much market share can you grab in 5 years? Capital – How much capital would you need to get to traction and subsequent break-even? All of the above, will get you start thinking. The overall plan will cover all of above, as you start developing a detailed plan…