This series of posts is all about how Kippa, Reminders for Microsoft Teams came into being. We started off our journey to build an app for Microsoft Teams and along the way decided to pay forward the experiences we have had in Canada’s tech industry. We wrote a course on how to launch a Startup.
The first post in this series introduced the course, Take Control: Seven Steps to Independence©. You can download it here for free, no registration required.
Post #2 in the series, explained the birth of Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams. It demonstrated how we applied the course’s theory to produce Klippas Technologies inc’s, Kippa – for Microsoft Teams’s Personal Assistant.
We looked at the idea behind Kippa’s birth: where he came from and why we think it’s a good market. We ended that post with the six questions we asked to validate the idea, the theory covered in the course’s Step 2, Validate.
We answered the questions in the post, but we didn’t go into the way we arrived at the answers. Easy – we did the exercises in the course! There were 5 in all and we’ll cover the first three in this post and the next 2 in post #4, coming soon.
The first three Exercises in the course were performed in Step 1, The Idea. Step 2 thus begins with:
Exercise 4—Define your Segment
The exercise defined the segment in which we believe we will compete.
Our single market is Microsoft Teams. We entered this name into a spreadsheet to create what would become our business plan as we completed the exercises in the remaining Steps. Makes sense, right? As a Microsoft Teams app, Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams, can only be sold to Microsoft Teams’ members.
Exercise 5—Define your Market Size
The example spreadsheet below is from a more advanced exercise in the course, but this Step centered around the market segment portion at the top:
Kippa, Reminders of Teams app market size calculation
For our purposes, the spreadsheet proved that we have a market of sufficient potential to meet our goals for Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams.
Exercise 6—Costing your solution
We created a new table in the sheet and called it Cost of Solution. And then we calculated the cost of designing and building Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams. We had to factor in the tools we needed to purchase. The equipment of any factory, and software is no different. Our tools were delivered electronically, and had names like Visual Studio and the Microsoft Teams SDK (Software Development Kit). And we factored in the Cloud Service, Azure, and how much of its services we’d need to first of all build Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams, but then run him. This last issue meant we had to figure out how Microsoft charged for Azure’s services, and then predict, without having a real way to test our assumptions, the amount of these services Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams would consume when running on behalf of Microsoft Teams user.
We tried to account for all of our expenses as well, of course, and even included a salary for ourselves. Yes, we are indeed human and not just one of the bots we create.
Here’s an example of what a a business plan starts to look like as you work your way through the Exercises.
Kippa, Reminders of Teams app-like business .
The next post continues with Exercise 7.
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