Putting together a plan (part 1)

I’ve been ranting about the traditional “business plan” for a long time. Hour after hour was spent writing business plans for SpeedGaming and (initially) Meebox, writing up what felt like endless pages of fantasy business plans, and trying to predict the business's 3- and 5-year future. I thought, “This is the way to do it”.?

And yes, you guessed it right. The plans never lasted more than a few months. At best…

They were written up and put in a drawer, never to see the light of day again!

Fuck the business plan - but have a plan!?

But as much as I resent the traditional 50+ page business plan, I acknowledge the need for a plan.

The kind of planning you do should match the stage of your business.?Solo entrepreneurs, scale-ups and enterprises are three different kinds of businesses that need three very different kind of planning.

So as a start-up, you should feel comfortable to say as I do: Fuck the business plan - but have a plan!?

The purpose of the business plan isn't to detail every action that needs to be taken. It's to set a direction and help ensure we're all running that way!

Having it all in your head isn’t enough, though. There needs to be some kind of structure.?

The Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder hits the sweet spot. It captures all the important elements, it’s simple, and it’s agile – easy to adjust as a fast-paced startup develops.?

In this and the next post, I’ll dissect Herodesk’s business plan for the first half of 2024 (it’s a long write, therefore: Two posts)...?

I’m sharing this for two reasons. First, I’d like to share my thoughts and plans and how they came about. And second, I’d love your feedback.?

By now, it should be no surprise to you what Herodesk.io is and does (if this is your first encounter with us, check the first post in this newsletter ). This and the next post will cover how to make it fly!

The Business Model Canvas has nine elements. In this post, I’ll cover these five:

• Value propositions
• Key activities
• Key resources
• Customer segments
• Customer relationships

Let’s go!?

Value proposition

This is the most important element of the BMC: What value proposition will your product or service offer your customers?

Herodesk's key value propositions will be:

• Central support hub: Herodesk will centralize customer communication across channels (E-mail, Chat, Social Media, etc.) in one tool, making it easy for the support agents to get an overview and ensure every message is replied to.
• Easy to use: Keep the interface simple and super fast; don’t clutter it with unnecessary or too advanced functions.
• Focus on “Job to be done”: We’re here to help the customers. The tool should facilitate that.
• Key integrations: An important part of giving best-in-class service is having the right information and integrations. We'll give our customers just that.
• Mobile friendly: When you’re not at your desktop, you should still be able to reply to your customers from your smartphone.
• Improve customer service: This has multiple dimensions. Managers want the best tool at the right price (cost savings) and ensure the agents are happy (easy to use and “job to be done") and as efficient as possible (reports). Agents want to be able to give great service to their customers. And the customers simply want to be treated fairly. Customer service improvements all around.
• Artificial intelligence: The hottest topic of the year. It's not something we’ll dive head first into or be first movers on, but it can be a big help with things like translations, summarisations, suggested replies, etc.

I have a list of features and integrations I want to implement. To some extent, the priority is decided by what paying customers want. They have a big say in what comes next as long as it's on the shortlist.

Key activities

What are the most important things to do to accomplish our goals? For Herodesk, it is:

• Product development: Listen to the customers and ensure that the product is continuously developing and always in the right direction. Be true to the vision and have the guts to say “No!” when a feature request will pull things in the wrong direction.
• Marketing & Promotion: We have a great product that the customers like to use. One of the most important tasks at this stage is gaining traction.
• Customer onboarding: When new customers sign up, they must be successfully onboarded, quickly reach the “Aha!”-moment and start using Herodesk in production. This will tighten their bond with the product and decrease the risk of future churn.

Key resources

To execute the key activities that must be done to deliver the value proposition to the customers, which will ultimately make them choose our product, we must have at our disposal:

• Human resources: The software isn’t writing itself (yet), the servers aren’t configuring themselves (yet), and the marketing campaigns aren’t appearing out of thin air. We need people to do this.
• High-speed cloud computing: For the product to be fast to work with, stable and always available, we need high-speed cloud computing from a trusted partner and a resilient setup.
• Intellectual property: The product is the code we write. Thus, this is our most important asset !?
• CA$H: Herodesk was launched on Sept. 4, 2023. In Jan 2024, we reached €500 MRR (monthly recurring revenue). There’s still some way to a profitable business. Therefore, we need cash to invest in the aforementioned areas to reach the promised land of cash-flow-positiveness.?

I've said from the beginning that I want to bootstrap Herodesk . I've put aside money to invest in and secure Herodesk for 2024. If all goes as planned, the company will be profitable and cash-flow-positive no later than the end of the year. From there, it will be a profitable business focusing on profit > growth and earning money before spending it .

Customer segments

Who are the target customers we’ll focus on for the next long period of time??

While Herodesk (and most products in this category in general) can serve customers in many different verticals across countries and continents, we need to focus initially on a small and very specific target group to gain traction within this segment.?

This traction will be the “snowball” that rolls down the hill, always increasing in speed and size, and as it does, swoops up more verticals and markets.?

For now:

• The Danish market. Herodesk is founded in Denmark. This is our home turf. We’ll start with winning here!?
• Primary: Small/mid-sized webshops (<100M revenue). There are approx. 20k webshops in Denmark. 6-7.000 use one of the smaller e-commerce platforms (DanDomain, Ideal.shop , GoldenPlanet, Shopprama, Shup, etc.). There are no other helpdesk tools that integrate with these! We have a very unique value proposition in this segment.?
• Secondary: Digital businesses with less than 10 customer service reps. It can be any type of business that communicates with its customers using digital written media.?

It’s important to remember that while these are the target customer segments, it doesn’t mean customers who fall outside this cannot use Herodesk—quite the contrary.

About ? of the users when writing this post are not in the primary segment (for example, some of our existing non-webshop customers are a cleaning business, a SaaS company and a betting company). Still, they are happy customers and users of Herodesk!?

However, this segment is those who will receive the bulk of our attention in the near future.

Instead of trying to solve a little bit for everybody, aim to solve everything for someone.?

Customer relationships

We will reach potential customers in the aforementioned segments using:

• Paid ads and organic content: Traditional digital advertising on Google, Meta, etc., and our presence on SoMe, personal blogs, etc., to spread the word about our product and the pains it relieves our customers. We are newcomers in the market. We need to build a brand!
• Partners: We want to partner strategically with the e-commerce platforms we build integrations to. We want them to tell their customers about our product and the integration with their own. We see it as a win-win-win for the customers, the partners and us.
• Referral: Traditional affiliate partners + referral to existing customers for referring new customers to us.
• Outreach: We will test different kinds of outreach to learn what works. It can be anything from cold calling to snail mail campaigns.

Once onboarded, we will strive to give best-in-class customer service to our customers because great customer service always wins !

In the next post, I’ll wrap up the BMC and talk about the last four elements and how the plan, as a whole, will direct Herodesk in the next months. Revenue streams and pricing models are especially interesting to discuss!