Week 9

This week the team had many discussions on what we wanted our final business plan to look like. By this point we had already considered:

- Non-profit business plan maintained by council.
- Crowd funding
- Offering advertising upfront to companies

Non of which had proved successful.

Disadvantages in non profit business plan.

We had decided not to go with the non profitable business structure because it seemed like a project that will take a lot of man power to sustain and the effort that was put in over powered the reward it gave. Relying on grants, advertising payments, and the dragons contributions did not seem like a solid structure especially when it came to repayments for the dragons.

It would also be difficult to take the app to other countries with the money we would make on grants alone.

Consideration of profitable business plans.

Use dragon's contributions to help cover development costs plus additional expenses for our labour as we aren't doing this unpaid, we need to make some kind of income to pay for food, accommodation etc.

'Private labelling' - Licensing our product to another company to sell under its own name, rather than under our own.
We are going to sell our app to councils, this will allow users of specific districts whose councils have purchased our private label app (via a monthly subscription) the ability to find sporting facilities in their district and ability to meet up with like minded people in the area for social pick-up sports.

There will only be one app available for download on the app store although once registering to the app via Facebook account or alternative offered methods the application will only become active to you once you 'allow application to access your location' - this will tailor the advertising to your district and provide a screen saying which council the app is brought to you by - this will put the councils name to a good cause promoting physical and mental wellbeing to the people within the region.

How we can sell to customers (Councils)
Showing them our target customers like and need the product.
Provide research, we will conduct research including hosting surveys of potential customers, interviews or supporting letters from influential users (sports stars)

This provides a scalable plan to expand. First starting with NZ councils then expanding to Australian districts and so on.


Other Revenue Models to look into
Product Affiliate Marketing - 

This model would allow us to advertise products related to sports that are on fishpond.co.nz. 5% of cost price from each sale is then awarded to the affiliate. We would use this method to gain profit whilst advertising for free.
The reason for free advertising is because it was hard to create an initial income from advertisers as they would like to have an initial user base to advertise to before they gave us any revenue for advertising space. In the long run we would negotiate a better deal or it potentially would do quite well if we had a large enough user base.

Once the user base has formed on our app we would then become more desirable to companies to advertise through us as a specific target market. Advertisers would be along the lines of Rebel Sport, Physio's within the area as well as sport centres and clubs.

Final Business plan

Our final business plan consisted of asking the dragons for the upfront cost.
This would be:

$60,000   fro app development
$20,000 to cover maintenance and our time spent setting up the company during the first year.

=$80,000 total cost upfront costs

We will offer the dragons 30% of the company in exchange  for this.

We will then generate money through advertising. The advertising will be local to each location users are using the app. Advertising local retailers, sports health facilities and clubs. The local council can also advertise community events, and local sports events,.eg. Super 15 or All blacks games. This will mean the sports related companies know they are advertising to a population that is very interested in what they have to offer.

We will also allow councils in each location users use the app be shown in affiliation with us. This will be done through showing there logo in a and message upon the start up of the app, eg. "Brought to you by the Wellington city council." This will have a positive effect for them as they will be seen to be taking an interest in community wellbeing.

It will also have a positive effect on us, as the app will have more appeal to the local community.

In in exchange fro our app promoting the council they will supply us with locations of sports field and court location with in there areas.

This partnership will cerate a community of like minded sports enthusiasts, between retailers, health facilities, casual sports players and competitive sports players and eth local council.


We will get our initial user base through working with the clubs and university recreational centers onboard to send out mass emails to members and promote our self on there social media.
 This will create enough initial user base for a user to download the app and find people to play with early after the apps completion. After this word of mouth and further promotion through new partners will see these numbers grow.

We will also not be advertising during the first year as the user base will still be small and growing. This would mean we would not be able to guarantee enough benefit to companies we sold advertising space to.

This would mean we would have no income just the money from the dragons to pay for our work and app maintenance, which is covered by the $20,000. We would be working in the first year as a second job to expand the company to new councils and countries. However, in future years after the app has become established and we have made relation ships with new councils profits would increase greatly with each new place we took the app.

after it has been proven successful in Wellington we will take it to the rest of New Zealand and then Australia and the USA and the rest of the world.