A Business Plan for a Multilingual Subscription App

By Mehmet Davut2020–2021

A complete business plan for a consumer app, from megatrends and a 389-person survey to the business model, competitors and funding.

Engineering answers only some of the questions a new product raises. This project, the final work of a master’s in technology entrepreneurship, took one idea for a consumer app and worked through the rest: the market it would enter, the people who would use it, how it would make money, who it would compete with and what it would cost to get there. The aim was a plan an investor could assess.

It started from megatrends instead of the product. Cities keep growing and digital transformation keeps changing daily life, and the problem the plan set out to solve came from what those two trends do to people.

The user research ran for three months: a survey of 389 people with demographic and behavioural questions, followed by online conversations with some of them. Its findings went straight into decisions. The make-up of the audience set the positioning and the first customer segment. The survey also found a contradiction between what people said they did and what they said they trusted, and that contradiction became the core value proposition. About half of the participants left an email address to hear more, which gave the plan its first list of beta users.

The business model follows the Lean Canvas and fills in all nine parts: problem, customer segment, value proposition, solution, unfair advantage, revenue streams, cost structure, key metrics and channels. The solution design put natural language processing at the centre of the main feature. The competitor analysis compared the three leading apps in the category on four qualities (easy to use, analysing what users enter, personal and local) and found that none of them had all four.

The financial forecast set out a month-by-month timeline to a first paid version, built by a founding team paid in shares, so that no outside money was needed before launch. After that it covered the use of a seed round, customer acquisition cost, the time to break even, subscription prices set per market and a Series A scenario. Markets were to open one language at a time, and the order came partly from evidence: a small test website in five languages had already shown where search traffic was coming from.

A master’s project in Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Istanbul Bilgi University, supervised by Prof. Dr. Ela Ünler. Written in English and not published.