The 12 Week Challenge: Week 2
My efforts to catch up with the 12 Week Challenge continue. I have spent the past few days working on the the task for Week 2. The focus of week 2 is to develop my idea from week 1 into a single page plan with a few more details.
The plan I am to develop is what is known as an OGSM: objectives, goals, strategies and measures. The Location Independence blog provides a template for writing an OGSM; I shall make this blog post count as that plan however. So, pull up a chair and let's begin.
Objectives: The Overall Mission
What is the ultimate goal of my plan? This ties in very much with some of my thoughts from week 1 wherein I identified that the initial offering can and should be somewhat different to the top-level offering one would offer eventually.
As stated in the last post, my ultimate goal is for my system to provide all the tools for small enterprises. I will summarise the full details of the idea in a separate post eventually; for now I will highlight the intended progression of the product. The initial product offers website and content management. The product can then grow -- through adding components -- into a total back office administration "solution".
Week 2's challenge challenges you to think beyond your original ambitions by asking "what would be an even bigger goal?" As I am designing my system to be scalable and flexible in terms of being spread out over several servers, this could make it appropriate as a real competitor to the likes of MS Sharepoint in large enterprises.
Goals: Translating the Vision into Specific Targets
My income goals for the year would be trying to get towards £500 a month just from subscriptions (so, 25 to 50 clients) and a further £500 from my time in doing any design or development work. I think this is a modest goal for the next 6 months and I would aim for the service to have expanded so there are tiers pitched at £50 or perhaps even £100 a month if they are providing value for that money. I speculate because I would have to assess the market value of each level of service as the system expands.
The focus from my service is primarily smaller businesses and, most likely, ones that are currently expanding or starting up.
Strategies: Decisions on How to Achieve Goals
I feel it is difficult to project "real" figures for income streams. Therefore I will plan for what I want them to be, not for what I think they will be.
This is an issue which I have considered previously, and several ideas may be of use in determining how to project income streams:
- find a competitive rate for each unit of work you do, match it and then multiply it with how many of those work units you think you can achieve per month;
- decide how much you want to be earning in total and divide that up by the amount of work you want to do on it per month; or
- instigate or join some form of marketplace where you can aim high and drop your price down to what your value is to the buyers therein.
So, starting with #1, what is a good rate for the initial service? The well-established 1&1 hosting service is advertising a package for customers to buy in a complete business website for £9.99 a month. Their product removes the need for customers to have technical knowledge or design skills. The cheapest available online shop which they offer is £4.99 a month and generic top-level domains are available from £8.99 a month. Their lowest tier product seems to be a £1.99 a month for a modest amount of hosting space on top of a domain.
Thus I can wave my hands in a vague sense and look at around £10 a month from
straight hosting and £15 when including e-commerce features. I can add in
a sliding scale of customisation options to achieve some
market segmentation and maybe I can make a modest estimate of £10-20 a month from
basic subscriptions. This means 100 clients would give a decent income from
The market at which I plan to pitch the basic website setup at this time is looking to be independent sellers of alternative and gothic clothing and jewellery. I have some links to people that set up such businesses by themselves and it would be good to help them get the key step of a suitable website sorted. This could change, but will be my working focus for now.
The intention is to seek out those that are at the stage where they are making products to sell but haven't secured a marketing or sales channel on the web in any form. I would hope to be able to provide a basic web presence whilst offering more advanced e-commerce features and personal consultancy to build that presence.
Measures: Tracking Progress
It's always advised to have some method by which to measure progress towards goals and objectives in almost any endeavour. The best approach I see is to pay close attention to statistical metrics to highlight areas that are doing well or need improving.
It's worth looking at what numbers need to be tracked. It's often overlooked that recording and tabulating figures is a fairly fruitless actvitity without first identifying what metrics you are planning to measure and what do you expect to learn from them.
To this end, I identify the flow of new customers to be as follows. All people targeted by the niche marketing are prospects. Those that find my website will be called visitors. Anyone that then goes on to buy a service is a client and those that retain subscriptions are recurring clients.
My activities will focus on converting people from the prospect end of the chain to being happy, recurring customers. Thus the activities are:
- Attracting as many prospects to the website as possible.
- Converting visitors to clients (ratio of those that are convertion is known as the
conversion rate - Retaining or up-selling clients to stay on paying for subscriptions or pay for more features.
The first is the usual collection of techniques of increasing rankings in Google results and measurable by website analytics. In fact, this is a whole area made of up various other metrics such as visitor count, bounce rate and referal tracking (which checks the effectiveness of advertising). What could be monitored here might well be enough for a whole separate post, so for now I can accept that measures do indeed exist to assess whether I'm attracting all the visits that I can.
The conversion rate is fairly easy to enumerate based on visit counts and actual customer interest, but is also one where I struggle to say with any definitive answer what the rate should be. At the very least, I can track this ratio and see how it changes over time as I build up the product and the website selling it.
It should be fairly easy to track the recurring client rate and ensure that it does not fall dramatically below the rate of new clients.
One addtional thing to consider is that I am likely to put up a free trial feature to entice more visitors to convert to an intermediate "trying it out" stage for the content management system. Thus I could be wanting to track the conversion rate from those trying out the system to those paying for the full thing.
Summary
I hope this is sufficient as an OGSM plan. I am finding it a good exercise to write these things out properly to see the words in front of me. I found especially useful having to identify measures as this is something I really must make sure I set up at the start so I have at least graphic feedback of just how well I am doing.