From the title you may guess I’m pulling together a business plan for HiLO Lens.
Why a business plan before Kickstarter ?
It is not a bad idea to plan – keeping in mind that planning is a tool for managing change not predicting the future! But the main motivation is to be able to discuss the project with a bank.
Imagine we reach our Kickstarter goal, it could take several weeks until the funds are available. But to start the production we need to make an initial payment. So hopefully the bank will agree to lend me part of the funds as soon as we hit the Kickstarter goal. Which would allow the production to start ASAP.
The fundraising goal on Kickstarter will most likely be $27,500
I thought Google Doc would be a great option for being able to share the financial projections. But it turns out that Google Docs does a terrible job of exporting the formulas, so I could not import them into my OpenOffice document. In the end I exported from Google Docs in PDF format, then saved the PDF file in tiff format using Preview, then imported the tiff into the OpenOffice doc as a picture. Not great but a workable solution.