Business Plan Development - Week 1

The first of the business plan “gurus” I’ve selected is a man by the name of Tim Berry. Having had an early career as a journalist, Berry eventually took to the world of business. He’s taught business at the University of Oregon, and has several successful business ventures under his belt. He founded Palo Alto Software and co-founded Borland International, just to name a couple of his experiences.

Tim has many key components to consider, when it comes to his recommendations for a business plan. He suggests they would be driven by the mission. They need to introduce a problem and propose a solution, as to make the business in question seem like a necessary one, the saturation of the marketplace in most things. There needs to be a consideration for strategy and tactics. In other words, the plan must be focused. And finally he prefers seeing the numbers and sales forecasts up front.

His website and blog have volumes worth of helpful information for the budding entrepreneur, no doubt helped by his years worth of experience. There isn’t nearly enough room (or time) to cover every detail, but one could learn a great deal from browsing either.

The second of my business plan experts is Akira Hirai, founder and CEO of Cayenne Consulting, which is essentially an entire service, dedicated to helping get businesses started. Akira has an extensive history as an entrepreneur. He started two internet companies in Silicon Valley prior to founding this service, and has had a number of management and similar positions throughout the years. He’s a regular guest speaker on business plans, finance, and more at the Phoenix chapter of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac entrepreneur training program, among others.

On the Cayenne Consulting blog, Akira reviews the essentials to a good business plan, albeit briefly. He notes that the business plan must be user friendly, meaning simply and easy to understand. Much like Berry, Akira suggests that the business plan solves some form of problem. It must include market analysis, goals and milestones, a compelling summary, and realistic expectations of financials and competitors.

Of the details mentioned here, I can say that I definitely intend to really focus on being realistic about the financials, because that is the most prominent force hanging over my own venture’s head. I would also take notes from Berry’s end, however, by keeping to the mission. The mission is what defines the company, in many ways. If it doesn’t come across, then it’d be incredibly easy for the company to fall into being one that exists “just to make money,” which is never good.

The YouTube Monopoly Coming To Its End? - MPD Professional Blog

In this day and age, if someone wants the answer to something and no one around knows the answer outright, they’re often told to “Google it.” Google is a website. It’s a search engine. It is a “tangible” thing, and a brand. However, its dominance has secured it such an ingrained spot in our society that it’s also become something else entirely – a verb. Despite that, however, Google doesn’t hold a monopoly as a search engine. There’s Bing, Yahoo!, and a slew of others. Unfortunately, there is website out there that provides a very useful service, but is so dominant as to nearly possess that kind of monopoly – YouTube.

Obviously YouTube does have competitors. However, at this point bothering to call them competitors might as well be a punch-line. Perhaps the most well known of these competitors, Dailymotion, just can’t compete, given its technical limitations, mere 100 million monthly audience, and lacking many of YouTube’s more convenient features (freemake, 2013). Other services, such as Vimeo or Veoh, are at their most convenient if you have money or are designed more for studio content and content that has considerable production value (Taty, 2010).

The point is that YouTube’s competitors are so minor or so terribly specific in what they’re offering, that they’re not truly worth mention for anyone seeking to get into creating internet content professionally and is just starting out. For all intents and purposes, YouTube does have a monopoly. Perhaps the title of the site prevents it from taking on the same verb-status as Google, but it’s become so ingrained in the culture as to be viewed in a similar fashion. And that creates problems. Over the past few years, and in fact in recent months, YouTube has been running into problems revolving around copyright and fair use laws, censorship, and poor community practices like the infamous YouTube Heroes campaign. These are becoming major issues with movements starting like WTFU (Where’s The Fair Use), and YouTube personalities like Philip DeFranco talking about the YouTube Heroes campaign. DeFranco even had to deal with this potential censorship issue, himself, but did, of course, deal with the situation in a classy, levelheaded way. Unfortunately, as YouTube has a monopoly, there’s very little that many of these people can do to defend themselves against problems like this. Luckily, there may be something new on the horizon.

What began primarily as a video game streaming website, Twitch has become something of a major force in entertainment. In fact, in 2014, Amazon bought it in a billion dollar deal. Its audience continues to grow exponentially, as well. As of that deal, it had an audience of roughly 55 million unique viewers per month (Wingfield, 2014). That’s over half of the 100 million total monthly audience it’d been pulling one year prior, in 2013 (freemake, 2013). That number, meanwhile, continues to grow. New features have been added to the site, including the ability to upload pre-recorded videos. The interface is likewise simple, many of its features are shared by YouTube, and many people do make a living on it, as many do with YouTube.  The only thing holding it back now is that monetization is restricted to Twitch partners. However, that’s hardly a true deterrent. If one can build the audience with Twitch, which is becoming more and more possible, with modern resources and a significant amount of hustle, they could go far.

Twitch is a considerable rising competitor for content creators to be aware of, and not just gamers. Many artists stream with it as well. Musicians hold streams, and some people who are actual “YouTubers” actually do prefer using Twitch’s streaming service over YouTube’s own. It could soon prove another majorly viable medium for creators to publish their work and really build a sense of community, while making a living in very much the same way many have with YouTube. The YouTube monopoly may just be coming to its end.

References

7 Free Video Sharing Sites to Watch & Upload Videos. (2013). In FreeMake. Retrieved October 16, 2016, from http://www.freemake.com/blog/top-7-free-video-sharing-sites/

Taty, . (2010, February 5). 12 Video Sites That Are Better Than YouTube. In Make Use Of. Retrieved from http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-12-sites-watch-videos-youtube/

Wingfield, N. (2014, August 25). What’s Twitch? Gamers Know, and Amazon Is Spending $1 Billion on It. In New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/technology/amazon-nears-a-deal-for-twitch.html?_r=0