• Customer Analysis
• Company Analysis
• Competitor Analysis
• Marketing Program
• Future Plans

For the customer’s analysis, we need to define what our target customers will be. Different customers require different tactics to approach them. For example, if your target customers are kids, you might want to have an interactive and cartoony website to showcase your product. Also, the prices should also be cheaper if it is a target for kids. For Beamstyle, we believe that most of our customers would be from the retail sector. We will market and price our solution to be attractive and affordable for these customers.

Company analysis is a section where we discuss our company’s strength and weakness. For Beamstyle, our advantage is that we use an agile approach to create our solutions. This approach is not commonly used in Hong Kong, and we may gain a slight advantage as one of the early adopter of this approach.

The competitor analysis is perhaps the most important point in the entire section. By gathering our competitor’s offerings and prices, we would know what kinds of service we should offer and at what price. For example, if your competitor can offer web hosting at a low price while you cannot, it might be better if you focus your marketing strategy on something else such as web design.

The marketing program would be a description on how you will market your products to your customers. For Beamstyle, it would be mainly from searches using search engines and referrals/word of mouth.

After the marketing analysis section comes the Operation Strategy and Process section. This section will outline how the business will run ideally. It will include the different steps from how to approach your customer and how to hand off the final piece of your software to them. For example, in our business plan, we outline the simple steps of our development process to how long we should provide our warranty process.

Our next update would be the final part of our business plan guideline tutorial. Be sure to come back and check it out. Please feel free to leave some comments if you would like to question me on the details.

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III

Last time, we left off writing section 2, the company history. We will now continue with section 3 of the business plan, the business concept. The business concept would answer the following questions:

• Products/Services the company provides
• The target customer groups
• How does the company’s products/service will stand out
• Distribution method/how it will run

For Beamstyle, we initially defined our services to be web design, online shop, and graphics design. We only defined these three services because we would like to first build our branding among the group of services which we expertise in. Our initial target customers will be local SMEs and non-profit organizations because we know projects from this group often are smaller. Due to our smaller team size, we believe that we can create our solutions with higher quality when we work on smaller projects.

We believe our agile development model will make us stand out from our competitors. In Hong Kong, agile development is rarely used because Hong Kong is a market where changes are not easily accepted. It is extremely difficult to have a customer in Hong Kong to adapt to the agile development model. However, Beamstyle uses a modified version of the agile development model that is created for the Hong Kong audience. We believe this will let our customers slowly understand the advantages of the Agile development model and accept this as the mainstream model for software development. In addition, our small team consists of members with over 10 years of web development. Each member has his own area of expertise. We understand a cross functional team is required for a full quality solution.

For our distribution method, we defined out how our company will work with our customers. This would include how we would arrange meetings with them. We defined the main flow on how we approach our customers. For example, we would first give out a sample quote for a project. Then we would write a detail requirement document. If our customer accepts the project, we would start to kick off. It is also a good opportunity to determine when to charge your clients. For example, at Beamstyle, we normally break our payment into three parts.

Other parts in the series:

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III

Many people think that a business plan is not useful unless they are using it to get funding from an angel investor or getting a loan from a bank. I can tell you that it is not true. I believe that the business plan is the single most important document I have written for Beamstyle. Some of the advantages of this document include:

• Letting your partner understand the business to prevent arguments later on
• Defining your business scope
• Learning more about the market and the competition
• Defining your market segmentation
• Knowing more about your financial situation

The first part of the business plan is an executive summary where I basically summarize our entire business in one page. It defines what the rest of the document would be about. In my executive summary, I have written:

• The type of solutions/products we offer
• Our competitors and what they offer
• Our advantages over them
• Our team
• Our goals and future development

I strongly recommend anyone of you writing a business plan to start with the execute summary as it gives you a strong guideline to follow for the rest of the document.

The second part of the business plan is the company history. This section would go in detail about the management team, showing the team’s strengths and weaknesses. It is a good opportunity to set the roles of each person in the company given the analysis of each member in the team. For example, after this analysis, we found out that we got a person who is a programmer, but he got a great deal of experience dealing with clients. We assigned him to be our business analyst and the job really suits him.

We all continue to discuss about the business plan next time, as I have to get back to work on the Beamstyle projects again. If you enjoy this series, please feel free to give me a vote on dzone.

Other parts in the series:

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III

Beamstyle actually got its name after long series thoughts. At the beginning, this company is actually called the SC Consultant Company (named after the founder of the company). However, our team thought this name sounds too professional and it doesn’t sound like a web design company. We would like a name which would easily associate with creativity and design. At the beginning, we found a couple of names we really like. There was one called “UniQ Web Design” (pronounced Unique). However, as with millions of other choices, the domain name is taken. Personally, I would like a .com address too because it is a default domain for almost all people. Everyone would try .com before trying the other domain. In addition, I would like to secure a .com.hk address for localization purposes.

Our team spent to entire day at name.com trying to look for a good name, and at the end we came up with a list of names with a .com address. Our criteria for choosing a name is that it must be 1 or 2 words, and it must have no hyphens and special characters. At the end, our choice is down to “Beamstyle” and “StyleStreak”. Actually, I really liked StyleStreak myself. However, when I mentioned this name to a few of my friends in Hong Kong, they are having problems remembering the “streak” part. I have seen people typing from “StyleStrake” to “StyleStreet”. Therefore, at the end we chose Beamstyle as our name.

Another unexpected thing we faced is that in order to register for .com.hk address, we need to have a business license. Luckily we have one already, or else it will take us much more time and investment to register for one.

Our website is 90% done now with just minor tweaks and bugs remaining to finish. Please take a look at Beamstyle Web Design Hong Kong website and give us your opinions.

In the next part, we will talk about writing a business plan and how useful it is to write one.

Other parts in the series:

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III

Beamstyle Logo - Web Design Hong Kong

Beamstyle was founded one day when I met a friend during a lunch. We both have the vision to be an entrepreneur, but we are unsure what we should do. We are pretty sure that it would be something software related, as my friend (and my business partner) is a master of computer science and I just have an deep interest and a degree in software engineering.

At first, we wanted to create a revolutionary web application which is a web based reminder and inventory management system. We shared this idea with a couple of our friends and they all liked it. However, things did not turn out as expected and the project was later scrapped.

This did not stop our entrepreneurial minds though. We are motivated that we can do something even better and bigger. One day, a friend of mine called me and asked me if I wanted to take on a freelance web based project. Since it was a pretty big project, I asked my partner if he had interest to help out. Coincidentally, he also had a potential project on hand and asked if I would like to contribute. This is the first time we think that there is a market for web design in Hong Kong.

Beamstyle was officially founded that day. A graphic designer and another programmer also joined us to create the company. However, starting up a business is not this simple.

I believe, as long as the motivation is there, Beamstyle will success as a business. In the next part of the series, I will talk about how we came up with the name “Beamstyle” and about domain name registration.

Other parts in the series:

Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III