It’s been a while…
It's been a while since I last posted but things have been getting more and more hectic with benchcoach. So we've reached a number of milestones, but as we stand looking back at the hill we climbed, we turn around and there's a mountain still waiting.
In any case, a quick update, we've launched an internal release of our site. It's not quite polished enough for us to release it yet, but we're working furiously to try and get there. We're also working on our business plan which has been an eye opening experience. Even if you're not planning on pitching your idea to an investor, the process of writing out a business plan, and trying to anticipate investors' questions and concerns, has proved invaluable. A lot of things we glossed over in our giddiness can no longer be ignored and other strategies need to be flushed out to a greater extent.
As a technologist, I tend to think of the technological side first and feel that the rest would take care of itself. Well that was the first douse of cold water on this cold December afternoon. These things don't take care of themselves and need to be addressed. Even if you don't plan on taking care of the issue, someone will have to. Here's an example using some made up figures.
Say that you estimate the market to be 50 million users. You figure if you can get 500,000 paying users, that would mean you get paid big time. You think, "that's only 1% of the market... no worries, our technology will be good enough to capture 1% of the paying market". Well it looks easy to go from 50M to 500K. Now try looking at it from the other perspective. How do I go from 0 users to 500K? That's when I crawled into bed with my Baseball Prospectus book and cried myself to sleep. Fortunately, I'm much cheerier in the morning and the thought of going from 0-500K increases my resolve to work harder and plan better, and take the marketing aspect more seriously.
So off I go now to try and develop a marketing strategy for our business plan.
