Today we finished our Business Model Canvas/Marketing Plan.
At this stage of the project, the idea began to feel a little more “real” as we started to get in the financial specifics of what it would take to make Homeroom happen. We had to research costs of all the components we would need in staffing the organization, making the website, maintaining the website, writing the articles, and making sure the world knows about Homeroom.
One of the challenges we faced was determining the revenue sources. As a non-profit, we would be very dependent on funding from grants, charities, and government organizations. While we are hoping this would be enough, our long term goal is to eventually be used by school boards throughout the province and country. We were unsure of what kind of compensation we should be getting from them. We decided that eventually we would like to charge school boards to use Homeroom throughout their districts, but would not charge individual users.
Another challenge was determining the specific cost of the creation of the website. Since there are so many different types of websites and needs vary project to project, it was virtually impossible to get an exact figure on how much it would cost to bring Homeroom to life. We decided to just invest as much as we could afford into paying for a web organization’s services to create and maintain the site. This will likely be cheaper in the long run than employing in-house staff.
When determining how much money we could theoretically get, we were pleased to learn that we would likely qualify for many existing grants and bursaries. This was a success- if we were to try and make Homeroom real, it is possible that it would be financially viable.
While it was challenging to determine whether to focus our efforts on the website, IOS app, or Android app, we decided to focus on the website first, while committing to expanding into apps once we were able.
All in all, while there were some gaps of figures we were not able to determine, completing this assignment together gave us a good sense of how Homeroom would do in the real world, and we were satisfied with the result.