This month hasn't been the most newsworthy month. But that's also a part of building a company - actually building a company. (And doing some freelance event planning work to help pay the bills, while building it)
INDUSTRY MARKET REPORT
I've spent some time this week reading UNCTAD's report on Creative Economy Outlook from 2022, which is quite informative. In it they state that the global export of creative services reached almost US$ 1.1 trillion in 2020. The interesting part is that's including the effects of the pandemic. Which meant creative services were only down by 1.8 % in 2020 (to comparison exports of all services fell by 20 %). The exception being creative software services, which had an annual growth in 2020 by 5.6 %. The report also states that cultural and creative industries generate nearly 50 million jobs globally. If you're interested in reading the whole 158 pages report, it can be found here:
https://unctad.org/publication/creative-economy-outlook-2022
LEARNING PYTHON IN 100 DAYS?
In case I won't be able to find the right investor(s) or technical co-founder right away, my plan is to try and build the MVP myself. That's why I've just started Replit's course in Python. They claim that you can learn how to build an MVP in 100 days spending only 15 min. a day (or less days if you spend more than 15 min. a day). So I figured I might as well get started learning. We'll see if it's possible. Worst case I'll probably gain a better understanding of programming - which would be useful too. So I figured it won't be a waste of time no matter what. I started yesterday and have already finished the first 13 days in one day…
SWOT & COMPETITOR ANALYSES
When I developed my idea, I spent a lot of (probably too much) time looking into around 30 of my direct and indirect competitors in quite a lot of detail, to try and figure out the best place in the market to position Formta. I’m currently working on taken all of that information and putting it into an actual competitor analysis for my business plan. I’ve also created my SWOT analysis this month.
FINISHED WEB PROTOTYPE
Oh, and I've finished the web version of my prototype. That means I now have something concrete to show investors (and potential customers, as a part of the actual product development and to use in marketing)
VERSION FOUR OF LANDING PAGE
Having a finished prototype means I can now update my landing page (for the 4th time since February) with product pictures / gif’s. I'm hoping that as well as getting back to developing the copy and branding, will improve the conversion rate even more. Which is one of my next steps on my to-do list, along with creating a mobile version of the prototype, writing the mission and vision statements and much more.