Todays focus was to hand over as much of the old assignment as possible to a colleague, but I also had a meeting with the CTO of the client organization to discuss the Business Model. I’ll summarize the result here.

Key partners

Developerment teams (two, no names here)
Google (for Search Console, analytics etc)
In the future, investors might become key partners

Key activities

Key activities are the product development, marketing and sales and top-level support.

Key Resources

Top-tier world class SEO knowledge and experience
Worker-application
Web knowledge
CEO’s own personal brand

Value propositions

The application will do the on-page SEO analysis, and reporting, of a top-tier world class SEO engineer, allowing SEO agencies to scale without the need to recruit the best engineers out there (who’s really not available to hire). This goes for both agencies with skilled engineers who can’t do more work, as well as agencies that lack the skilled engineers.

Customer Relationships

Today, there are no customers, hence no relationships. However, to make this project successful we anticipate close, personal relationships, with easy access to high level support. This is a premium offer, and is priced as such.

Channels

One obvious channel is SEO, since SEO is the core of the business. The company also plans to attend conferences and to targeted sales outreach. What will work, what will be cost effective? We don’t know yet. My guess is that most activities will lead to a demo, and from there a personal sales/support person lead the way to a signed deal. Since this is such a premium offer, I will not be surprised if the only CTA on the website is book a demo.

Customer Segments

The main customer segment is SEO agencies, but also digital marketing agencies who offer SEO services. First year, focus will be on the Swedish market, where the CEO estimates a relevant market of 70-100 potential customers. He aims to sign 10 of them. Through his many years in the business, he’s built a personal relationship with many of the other SEO agencies and is confident the target will be met. Then, we take on the world market.

Cost Structure

Initially, the main cost is for developers (and architect), but soon costs for sales and marketing will be added, and then also cost for support. Hosting and running the application will also bring cost, but probably just a fraction of the total cost.

Revenue Streams

There are two revenue streams, the first one is the subscription fee from the customers, the other is investments.

Since this application does the work of several senior SEO engineers, the presumption is that the will to pay is high. My guess is that we will need to have different tiers of subscription, probably volume based or possibly feature based (or both), but the client mentioned nothing about that.

Competitors

Not part of the BMC, I know, but I needed to check with the CEO. He mentioned two tools, Ahref and Semrush. Both of them offer tools somewhat related to what we’re trying to do, but not all the way. The CEO also point out that even if there are noone doing this today, he expect competitors will launch within 12 months. He’s main concern if that some of the big names does it before we launch.

First, for the project I’m doing the certification, I’m using a different laptop than I did for my previous assignment. Today was the first day with that other laptop at home. This laptop needs power, lots of powers. The combination of the USB-charger from the old laptop, and an USB-charger for my phone wasn’t enough to keep it running for long. It was however quite enough to charge it when turned off. Hence, I’ve been working with pen and paper today. Tomorrow I will bring the charger home from the office.

Also, where are my drawing-skills? Why do I all of a sudden find it so hard to draw the flow charts? It’s pretty clear in my head, and I know the first draft doesn’t need to be perfect (believe me, it will not be perfect), yet I’m having a hard time starting. Oh well, tomorrow I’ll do the basics.

Since almost everything about this project is unclear, I’ve asked the CEO for a meeting, to talk about the Business Model Canva. Sure I have ideas of my own but that’s definitely not enough.

What the hell have I gotten myself in to? Is this just imposter syndrome or do I actually suck? Why can’t I remember anything from the courses?

But also, it’s finally started, and I’m in. It’s all up to me now. I’ve attended the required courses, I have the slides, I have the motivation. Let’s do this!

Have I read the yearly report? Yes I have, but it’s really not relevant in this case, since the company is pivoting.

I’ve been reading up on BMC, FMEA and STRIDE, and I’m looking forward to start working on these.

The naive architecture has two major parts, the web application where users login and handle their assets (to not reveal too much). The other part is the actual work engine.

The work engine is developed by an external developer, and is pretty much a black box, that we need to scale without it being scalable. Kubernetes came to mind, but since we need one instance per execution, I’m thinking something like an Azure Container App.

The web application has a naive architecture with an Angular frontend and a C# backend. For the naive architecture everything is served by a SQL Server, but that is already questioned.

Also, I’ve missed blogging.

At first glance, the business problem seems obvious. The SEO-guru has actually specified what he looks at in a site, technically, when analyzing SEO performance, and ranked different details to make it “easy” (possible at least) to create a program that does the technical analysis of a site. This tool needs to be cloudified, and sold.

Customers are companies (mostly) that does SEO for clients. The business case is that the application will replace the advanced technical site analysis, and free time, potentially hours per execution, for the team.

Since this is a startup, time to market is key. Also, in the words of the founder, there is no other application like this today, but I’ll be surprised if nobody thought about it.

We need an architecture that will allow us to hit the market fast, but still allow us to scale.

The focus from the founder is, at least for now, to get clients first, and investors later.