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Business Plan - Charter

Written by: Brad Feld

Article Overview: Back when I was 21 years old I figured you had to start somewhere. Our business plan started with a “charter statement” which – in hindsight – was roughly equivalent to a vision statement.

Business Plan - Charter

Back when I was 21 years old I figured you had to start somewhere. Our business plan started with a “charter statement” which – in hindsight – was roughly equivalent to a vision statement.

1 CHARTER

Feld Technologies intends to become the industry leader in semi-custom software. It will do this by understanding and addressing all of the components of database application software for small businesses, thus defining the industry.

Feld Technologies is also a vehicle through which to tap the productive abilities of its founders, with the intent of creating a "world" for its employees.
The Company is established for their benefit. The Company will act as a mechanism to leverage the founders intellectual and implementational talents in an attempt to make them authorities in the software industry.

In 1987 the software industry was still pretty young (guess how big Microsoft was – if you don’t know, you’ll find out in the next post in the series. Hint – Lotus was about the same size.) So – it was probably conceivable to us that we could “define the semi-custom software” industry (since it didn’t exist). I remember spending a lot of time trying to figure out a unique label for what we were going to do (we hadn’t thought of Web 2.0 in 1987) and ultimately settled on “semi-custom software.”

We were young and idealistic so we were determined to “create a world for our employees.” While our world ended up being modest (we sold the business when we were 20 people), we did create something that was unique and impactful to the lives of most of our employees (including us). A little idealism never hurts. It’s not quite as pithy and elegant as “don’t be evil” but you get the point.

Read this post in Brad's blog.

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Article Tags: authorities, benefit, blog, business plan, charter statement, custom software, database application software, founders, guess, hindsight, industry leader, lotus, microsoft, small businesses, software industry, statement 1, talents, vision statement



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Business Innovation - Hi Simon If you can finish off the Business Plan and think about your strategic direction or how you are going to use your product to convince people it's a great idea, it will set the foundation for your programming project. You see, when you are looking for funding you will need a Business Plan and Strategic Plan that will convince companies to invest into your new idea. Has anyone achieved this idea before using another industry besides health and fitness that you know of? You should also design some mockups as a "preview" for your programming project. This will also help reduce your programming costs as everyone will know exactly what you want if you have detailed mockups already completed including any functionality you require. Starting mockups for websites and software applications on paper is the best way if you're not a guru in graphic editing software.
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