Recreating Silicon Valley

Maxim · Joined: 04 Apr 2011 Posts: 4 Location: Moscow

Hello Team!
The task for the second week was: List at least 3 barriers you see your team or project needing to overcome prior to the final presentation and discuss possible solutions for overcoming them. So we as young entrepreneurs have great deal unsolved problems as well as solved. I want to discuss with you some of them. First of all I mark out three of them. I hope that we will find way out together.
Here they are:
1) Clear and detailed information on robots market and market of navigation systems for them is not available in free access.
2) We lack experience in presentation of our product to different investors.
3) Absence of full detailed business plan.
The biggest problem for us is first in the list. It means that we can`t exactly say how many robots need our systems. It is difficult to estimate how many copies of our software we can sell yearly. So we decided to make marketing research ourselves. E.g. we found some info and statistics at http://www.worldrobotics.org/ in document http://www.worldrobotics.org/downloads/2010_Executive_Summary_rev(2).pdf . We have information about, number of service robots types are produced yearly. We took one per cent of autonomous service robots so we can make rough estimate the need of our product. In addition we sent advertisement annotation:
https://rapidshare.com/files/458454407/Sybo_Robotics_brochure.pdf
of our hardware system to different companies to proof the interest in our products. Most respondents are interested in system and want to buy it. Discussion and responses of some of them :
https://rapidshare.com/files/458454497/Letter_Bluebotics.docx
https://rapidshare.com/files/458454503/Letter_Robotnik.docx
Though we are not experienced in marketing it is better than nothing.
Second problem is absence of experience in presenting our project to investors. All members have technical education, we hardly know how to make presentations properly, what should be emphasized e.t.c. We spent most time on developing the product. And we finally faced difficulties with preparation of introductory materials: website, presentation, annotation, etc.
We are going to make the following till the end of RSV:
1) Presentation
2) Short annotation
3) Detailed description of our project with science analysis, marketing research and finance calculations, strategy and plan of the work.
4) Website introducing with our project

When everything is ready we will post it at the forum.Also we plan to find and invite new members in our team - people who can do marketing and investor search, develop business model and etc.
The third problem is absence of a full detailed business plan. Product market for our systems is international (especially USA). So we are ready to create a firm in any English-speaking country where there are all necessary conditions that it can nicely develop. To make full business plan we must know all particular data about the country: employee `s salary, rent rates, equipment prices. It is evident that if I make business plan for Moscow it won`t be interesting to American. So it seems to me that I have to make business plans for every particular country...

treseder · Joined: 05 Apr 2011 Posts: 6

I look forward to seeing your presentation as it develops - please make sure to ask us questions about the style and content. We can work with the actual presentation skills once you arrive but often the PowerPoint gives a pretty good indication of where the most work needs to be done.

The basics of the business plan do not need to change from country to country, merely be adjusted based on commercial and cultural factors. I would just focus on one - be it Russian or American - and develop it. We can always adjust later on.

Can you resend the feedback you received to our email addresses as Word document?