Business Plan

Recently I did a Business Plan presentation with my friend vishal for our startup “The Students Center” and i just want to share that experience.

Studying about the business plan in theory and doing an actual presenation was completely different. We started our Bplan by explaining about our Startup like what exactly it is and what its logo meant and stood for.

The Main thing which we have to analyse and undertsand in detail is the Need of the Market. So did a lot of research on that part beacuse for any business to be successful, it has to undertsand the need of the market.

There are about 4.5K+ MBA colleges, 10K+ Engineering colleges and 800+ universities in India, Conducting 100K+ events in a year. It is difficult both for the Institute and for the students to provide and get Information about these events across cities and states. So there was a need for an efficient way of providing information and our startups aim was to provide that common platform for Information.

When it came to Business Model we adopted the Osterwalder Business model Canvas where we were able to see things what we needed to achieve, how to achieve it etc.

The Canvas was Structured in a way that all the featues like Value proposition, Key Activities, Customer Segmentation, Customer Relation, Channels, Key Resources, Cost structure and Revenue Streams were covered.

The main thing when it comes to a business plan is how you are different from your competitors (the Differentiation Factor).

• None of the competitors have launched a mobile phone application, but we planned on launching an app, which will make it more convenient for the audience.
• With the App, the students will get a reminders saying “Pack your Bags” you have a competition tomorrow at this college, at this time stating the price money also.
• The competitors generally provided details about the college events only. But Students Center will also provide information about the private certification courses like CA, CFA etc.
• So students can have a cross comparison of the courses in terms of Faculties, institutions, fees, location, timings, placements etc.

Our Revenue model was: Commercial Advertisements where we will charge a fee from local business like KFC, Dominos, Herohonda, Homosapiens etc who which to put stalls in various colleges during events for their product demonstration, promotion, marketing etc.

Then there is a Subscription pack where the institutes can subscribe to an Annual pack where they can list any number of events they conduct in that year on our site. Then there is Event pricing also where we will be charging a fee on a per event basis.

Coming to the financial part we Forecasted the P&L account for next three financial year giving all the break ins in details like for example:

Expenses

Salary:

•Small team of 7 people, the founders won’t be taking any salary till the start up breaks even. The remaining five employees will receive an average salary of Rs.22,000 per month. The employees will mostly be Interns or freelancers.

System:

•We will purchase three laptops in the first year which will cost Rs.50,000 each.

Rent:

•A small office space with a rent of Rs.10,000 per month assuming it increases every year by 10%.

Vehicle:

•We will purchase 2 second hand bikes with fuel expenses being Rs5,000 per month.

Recreation:

•A Recreation Expense of Rs.1,250 per week.

Misc. Expenses:

• 10% of all the expenses has been take as Misc. Expenses for all the three FY.

•In the first FY our only source of revenue will be Commercial Advertisements which includes charging a fee from Businesses for providing information about events.

•In the Second FY we will be targeting to achieve 500 institutes of which assume 100 institutes subscribe our yearly package costing Rs.2,000 and the remaining 400 institutes will pay Rs.250 per event considering 10 events per institute.

•In the Third FY we will increase our Target institutes to 750 with the same charges as per the second FY.

•By third year we Expect to break even as per the Estimation.

And depending on our Expenses we asked for an Investment of Rs.60 lakhs to achieve our targets and break even.

For that we were ready to give 20% equity to investors also ;)

This is how we made our Business Plan. It was a great experience for both of us. Presenting the Business Plan of your startup in front of others and having them like it, there is no better feeling other than that. Finally we launched our MVP Minimum Viable Product:

•Link: https://sites.google.com/view/studentscenter/home?authuser=0

And thats how we did our Business Plan.