Development / Business Plan — DigitalMediaMagik.com

Last updated: 1/Oct/2008 11:48
Contact: Kevin.Pammett@DigitalMediaMagik.com

Initially created on 28/Jul/2008, this is a slight update to the third version of my set of   Steps to Take   for DMM:

Entrepreneurial Vision

Products and Services

• Panoramas
• Digital Photography (I may rename this: "Photo Magik")
• Slide Shows
• Music by the Score
• Photo Gold Mining
• Story Boards
• Consulting Services
• More Items — are we done yet?

1. [Concept]: Try to sell the idea to prospective clients — talk it up to men in our circles, people in the streets, at networking meetings — anywhere I can get anyone to listen to me. This is the stage where I make the "Go / no-Go" decision about whether to pursue an Item or not.



2. [Feasibility]: Most of my Items involve using different multimedia technologies, in various combinations, producing a specific result. Sometimes "the same instance" of an Item can be delivered in multiple ways ("formats"), but before I can do very much of significance wrt any type of Item I have to get my hands dirty and come up with a specific example.



3. [Prototype]: Make a page (or more?) for it on DigitalMediaMagik.com (such as Story Boards) and get early reaction from reviewers about the idea.



4. [Initial Offering]: Iff the idea seems feasible, flesh out the Prototype page(s) such that they give enough details for someone to contact me regarding the product.



5. [FCS]: (First Customer Ship) Find a client who is willing to be my first customer — work with me thru the details of how the Item can be developed, tested, and delivered. Instead of focusing on money, get my initial customers to produce testimonials that I will use to develop my DMM community. This is where the "Products" vs. "Services" question triggers a very different delivery vehicle; I need experience with both of these.



6. [PayPal Offering]: Once I get a few customers (on a specific Item) it only makes sense to work out a way that the transactional part of this can happen without undue time being wasted on it. I don't know if that'll be PayPal or what, but I have to figure out how this is not going to be a sink hole of energy / time.

Near-term Action Items

• Find out what the status of my unemployment insurance is
  -ByWhen: 4/Aug/2008 14:29 (done)
• Come up with a deadline (date) for getting a software contracting position

-ByWhen:
• Write a CPR for my business and get my team (and others?) to review it.
  -ByWhen:
• The logo that I have for DigitalMediaMagik.com is totally a place-holder. I need to come up with something less embarassing.
  -ByWhen:



• DMM community — use a blog on my DigitalMediaMagik.com site to (a) let me post "company news", (b) write articles about successful project as I do them, and (c) customers will either write articles or respond to mine, amounting to testimonials. All of this is intended to attract a community of users because what gets posted will be picked up by Google search engines.
  -ByWhen: 4/Aug/2008 14:29 (done)
  -but even as of 1/Oct/2008 11:58 I've still got more to do before my company blog is actually operational. Maybe the next best milestone would be for me to have an actual client post a testimonial about a "job well done" there.
  -ByWhen:



• ["Public Relations"]: This amounts to getting my name / my company name "out there" as pervasively as makes sense in cyberspace. One way to begin doing this is for me to write product reviews, make blog postings — whatever — using my DMM Credentials (Kevin.Pammett@DigitalMediaMagik.com).

-ByWhen:


• Finish my Magik pages — complete the prototyping that I've been doing on all pages headed up by this "Magik" high-level description and get to the point where the same look and feel applies to all the pages.
  -ByWhen: 6/Sep/2008 10:00     See herein for this completion milestone.



• I really need to come up with a more professional look and feel for my company web site. It's way to "developer"-looking.
  -ByWhen:



• It's time for me to come up with an actual, real-life, "fully paying" first client for at least one of my main services or products. As of 1/Oct/2008 12:35 I have a few in mind and I did commit to making that all-important first contact...
  -ByWhen: 3/Oct/2008 12:00 (noon)



• tbs

-ByWhen:

Scheduling Matrix

The rows in the table refer to the "Products or Services" (I use "Item" for this) that DMM will offer. The columns in the table refer to the "phases" — the development paradigm (detailed here) — thru which this business plan calls for action. We don't have a column for Concept here because until I work something beyond that, there's no point in scheduling it.

To keep this table as simple and as uncluttered as possible, I'm going to adhere to the following conventions.

• The cell is empty when I haven't even scheduled this effort yet.
• When the cell is not empty — it contains a timestamp — it signifies one of two things: (1) it is a hotlink (you can click on it in your browser) when there IS a description for the milestone herein (or in cyberspace). Otherwise, (2) it is not a hotlink and the timestamp still "points" it's just that it goes to elsewhere in my engineering notes (not something anyone else can get to but still useful to me).
• The timestamp in the cell is italics when I have set an in-the-future milestone for it. It might be when this effort will begin, or it might be just another step along the way towards the completion of the "phase" that is implied by the Table column. The link (the timestamp) will point to elsewhere in this document where the next step work is detailed.
• The timestamp in the cell is bold when I have completed some sort of milestone for this Item. The link (the timestamp) may point to elsewhere in the document where the remaining work is detailed.
• The timestamp in the cell is bold and italics when I have essentially completed this work.

Milestones

1. Register the web name "DigitalMediaMagik.com" and associate it with my Initial web site going on-line: 13/Jun/2008 9:31



2. Initial Business Card ordered: 16/Jun/2008 15:13
   -cards received near 27/Jun/2008 12:33 and I began giving them out "to everyone".



3. Initial templated web site goes on-line: 3/Jul/2008
   (meaning the web site was built with showcase technology) on-line albeit somewhat clandestine because there was so little there.



4. Debut my entreprenurial vision and placeholder DMM Icon: 4/Jul/2008 15:06
   -in my (personal) blog article entitled "Independence Day".



5. Initial Offering for "Panorama" pages: 2/Sep/2008 16:46
   -I created a generator for these pages and used that to populate a "full set" which all look similar: Tue 07/15/2008 at 02:15 PM



6. Initial Offering for "Magik" pages: 2/Sep/2008 16:46



7. Debut my presentation paradigm for "Magik": 24/Jul/2008 15:01
   -in my (personal) blog article entitled "It's great to be alive !!". The page linked-to here now is a replacement for my original which I withdrew for family privacy reasons.



8. Initial DMM coming out: 24/Jul/2008 12:54
   Redirect DigitalMediaMagik.com to point to the templated web site and make the "not public" part of my web site still exist on the web, but there's only a 'secret way' for anyone to get to it.



9. Business plan Created: 28/Jul/2008 16:08
   and circulated to a few men, but very little feedback was received.



10. The DigitalMediaMagik blog goes on-line: 31/Jul/2008 23:41
    albeit somewhat clandestine because there's only one article there + I haven't really worked out the templating that I want.



11. Nanci was my first "Magik" customer: 28/Aug/2008 11:36
    I sent her this final product.



12. I completed the Magik pages prototyping near 1/Oct/2008 10:18 and even wrote a blog article "Improved User Interface for Magik Pages" to promote this to my community.



13. dkdk

More Products and Services

1. Could I possibly make money working with clients who are really just looking for those "Digital Photo Frame" products now widely available? Some of them are attached to the internet, some just to the family's LAN, some can even be hooked up with on-line picture repositories like Flickr. So how can I bring value to that? — hand-holding people wrt how to get the digital snapshots out of their cameras and into the memory chip that you plug into the "Picture Frame"… doesn't sound very compelling.
   —\Would could I do to make this idea more compelling?\



2. I could help people build web sites or build them "to order".
   This is perhaps a fall-back strategy; it's not what I really want to do because my vision has me working with people — not with corporations. But I still need to hold open this possibility and perhaps for that reason alone I should have this "possibility" on DigitalMediaMagik.com



3. What I might call "eVite services" has me working with people to be the "middle man" in helping them set up large parties or gatherings. Yea, eVite.com and myPunchbowl.com (and many others ) are all free services, but that doesn't mean there isn't an entrepreneurial advantage to helping out people who are unable or unwilling to do this on their own.