A Business Plan for an It Start-Up

“GROWBUZZ – Growing Your Business”

A Business Plan for an IT Start-Up

Made By –

Rohit Saini

Richa Tapadia

Nikhil Parmar Rajnikanth

Prateek Kiran

Group – A7

Executive Summary

The company is an ITES startup that makes apps and websites for third party. The business aims at targeting the lesser exploited markets of grocery stores, schools and medical stores. For doing the on-ground marketing of our services, we have planned to hire a salesman. We’ll train him well and make him enough knowledgeable about our business so that he can give us our potential customers. Digital marketing is done through social media ad campaigns like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Conventional channels like print media and radio broadcasts are also used. We are targeting the local grocery stores that cater to the needs of the general public. The concept is to bring the local stores online. This is beneficial to both the parties i.e. the customer and the store owner. The customer can place orders from his or her home. Or even when he or she is not around and the product will be delivered at his/her doorstep. The stores on the other hand, can now sell their stuff to a much larger market leading to a larger profit. The schools prove to be a wonderful market for providing service based solutions. Here, the services we provide are for the clients of the school i.e. the students. Such a service becomes the USP (Unique Selling Point) for a school and also proves to be a great asset to the students. We will provide both web based and app based product here. The need of schools to advance themselves into the teaching pedagogy supplemented with analytics has also made them a lucrative market. The medical stores hold a very responsible function in the society. We aim to ease the process of medicine procurement. The app developed for this purpose shall make use of the GPS functionality present in the phones for pinpointing them to the nearest drug store.  The app shall integrate in itself Google Maps, or Navi Maps so as to provide navigational guidance to the user. This proves to be a really great tool at the time of emergencies. An additional vertical also exists by the name miscellaneous apps and is a non-commercial one which exists purely to augment the future endeavors of the company into Research and Development. Most of the operations of the company mimic an e-commerce approach except for the presence of additional stores that are usually not scouted on account of them being small in size (in case of grocery stores), or being one from those domains that have traditionally been left off from the e-commerce ecosystem. The expense budget for setting up the company comes out to be 249000. With a costing mechanism in place, the break-even analysis shows that revenues will turn to profits after the 12th month. Government Funding and Commercial Lending are the preferred forms in which the company aims to draw funding for its functioning. The future planning depends on the type of returns that the company earns in its present setting. If positive then expansions and diversifications are set to follow. If not, introspection and research on domains will yield corrective measures.

Word Count - 513

Table of Contents

Introduction        

Analysis of the industry        

SWOT Analysis of the Industry        

Strengths:        

Weakness:        

Opportunity:        

Threats:        

Marketing        

Digital Marketing:        

Marketing via Print Media:        

Ads through Radio Channels:        

Verticals        

Analysis        

Operation –        

Break Even Analysis        

Funding –        

Decision making and evaluation criteria:        

Future Plans        

References:        

Introduction

Our business idea is a service based Information Technology start-up company to develop websites and mobile applications for different business users who will use our services to grow and expand their business. Our initial target are the ignored markets like local general stores, pharmaceutical stores and schools. Our end users will be local consumers who will be using the above services with the help of websites and applications developed by us. In the current scenario, people have busy schedules and it may be inconvenient for them to deal with daily chores like buying grocery, medicines and going school of checking the progress of their children. In addition of this, India has a huge potential for e-commerce and mobile applications based services in near future as number of smartphone and internet users are growing substantially.

Analysis of the industry

India is the second largest smartphone market globally. India is also the fastest growing internet market according to a U.S. based firm’s Visual Networking Index. According to its report, the number of smartphones in India grew 54 per cent during 2014, reaching 140 million in number and the number of smartphones will grow 4.7-fold between 2014 and 2019, reaching 651 million in number. As on 31st October 2014, a report from TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) shows that there were about 935 million mobile connections in India. Out of these, approximately 548 million were from urban India and rest are from Rural India.

The development of low cost smartphones has led to an increase in adoption of smartphones. The Internet in India took more than a decade to move from 10 million to 100 million and 3 years from 100 million to 200 million. However, it took only a year to move from 200 to 300 million users.

As of October 2014, there were 159 mobile Internet users in India and out of these 40 million were from Rural India and 119 million users were from Urban India, a clear growth of 45% from October 2013. It clearly indicates that Internet is growing in India rapidly.