I've been re-tagging many of the posts on this blog. I've got a new tag browser and so I've been going through the old posts, categorizing them. For example, here are all the posts that talk about the ConQwest game , and here are ones with mobile industry stats , and here are all the posts about Waterloo . It's not perfect but it's pretty good. Some posts were hard to sort.

I can't believe how naïve I was about some things though. For example, just a year ago in "follow the money" I wrote "I will probably not reveal a few key facts ... how much money do we project we will earn over the next five years"

The idea that I thought that I could project our revenues over five years back then is laughable. The very idea that I needed to have that in the business plan was a bit ridiculous. No one, and I mean no one, as an investor expects an early-stage company like Semacode in a new market with a new kind of product, to have a revenue projection.

So what are they looking for? Well, they DO want to get a rough idea of the size of the smallest market you can get numbers for. So, in our case we could say "the barcode market" is so-and-so billion $s or "the online advertising market" is $XYZ. But beyond knowing it, you should NOT make some kind of prediction that you're going to capture some percentage of that market. Because no one can just wave a magic wand and get some kind of %age. You have to actually find customers who are willing to pay for something, and that's what your business plan needs to talk about. Who they are, and why, why, why would they shell out bucks?

I got some good advice a few weeks ago from Hermione at the AC (name changed to protect the innocent). Every time you give a reason in your plan why someone would pay you, ask "why?". You know the kid who asks you a question and then always says "why?" when you answer it? Well, you should pretend you have that kid over your shoulder. Why would an advertiser want to pay me money? Why would a newspaper put a barcode on their page? Why a barcode and not just a URL? Why are they going to make money from that? Why, why why?

Anyway, the business plan is all about answering the following simple question. "Who, and why would someone give this company money?" Your answer has to be so good that it's OBVIOUS that you're right. This doesn't necessarily take 25 or 80 or whatever pages, either.

Anyway, enough rattling on about that. More experienced business people than myself are currently evaluating my own attempt to answer that question for Semacode Corporation. We'll see what happens!