David Christmas
George Alton
Summary of there enterprise:
The business is to be based around providing online services to students. The prime focus would be those who need temporary hosting and design services during their time at University/College. This could be for a range of things from actual term-time projects (something like Rave Live) through to online portfolio hosting.
The primary focus at the beginning is students who need temporary online services at some point. To that end our major USP would be that we would not attempt to lock the customer down into lengthy contracts but simply provide the service on a month by month basis.
To supplement this we would look firstly into providing basic template solutions that require the minimal amount of effort from the client in order for them to have a functional website, this would mostly be used for basic portfolio presentation during the job application process. Taking this further we could offer more complex and involved hosting/design/technical support services to student start-ups and larger projects.
Would develop an “after University” support section for graduated students who wish to keep their services. This would be a major development once the original start-up was functioning and profitable.
Mission statement: “we see ourselves providing personal, affordable and no ties web services to the student community. These can be tailored as little or as much as the clients require to help them achieve the best in their endeavours”
Measurable aim(s) of there enterprise
Highly attractive and affordable the natural flow of the student communications channels should do a lot for our promotion.
Promote e and e projects on the webiste
Aiming for 2 – 5 paying customers by the end of the project, spread over various services and at different levels of involvement (short term customers vs long term customers etc)
A starting point would be a website, moving through small-scale social media promotions (a Facebook group etc). The major driving force would be contacting people and making use of already established contacts to bring business and inherrently spread the word through their day-to-day conversations
Action Plan
Weeks 1&2 – Market research, infrastructure research
Weeks 3&4 – Set up own website and hosting, (obtaining/investing in static IP etc) begin to refine portfolio design templates
Weeks 3 – 6 – Promote via word of mouth/online presence and begin arranging client meetings and working to provide the first stages of solutions
Weeks 6+ – Continue with progress, re-asses and re-evaluate enterprise direction and adjust project goals/progress plans accordingly
Budget
havent worked out thier budget yet.
Exit Strategy/ Risk management
Two weeks of market research and technical research will give us a better idea of what we would stand to lose. However as is usually the case with Web infrastructure, the entire thing can be built on older systems and then migrated over to newer systems once investment and uptake have reached appropriate levels. This should minimize the lost investment if the project were to fail during the first 6 weeks.
After this point, the focus should be on continuing student uptake (helped by the fact that every year there are more students entering education) and retaining graduates (this part of the enterprise can be worked on at around a 6month point of the first year, once the original project is seen to be effective).
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