Day 2 in Davos – Security & Wireframing

When I arrived in Davos yesterday, the word for the day quickly became security. Not just police and normal security, but hard core military, Given the state of affairs in the world today it is understandable, but it is shocking to see them on almost every corner.

After registration, I quickly set about to start thinking and coding.

I really want to absorb the ideas of the speakers and panelist discussions to influence how and why I design the biz planning app. I started with The Promise of Progress session focused on how the world will deal with increased productivity, and it’s on the workforce. With unemployment of 28% in Spain for those under 25, the destruction of Detroit both as city and manufacturing hub and the almost slave conditions and wages of Bangladesh garment workers are producing issues changing the world order. Vishal Sikka, CEO of Infosys from India was quite focused on the far that Spain and Detroit needed to upgrade their skill set and teach coding like they do reading and writing. Then they become more productive and are willing purchase cloths at a high price point so the Bangladesh working can make a living wage.

I came out of the session and listened to a wonderful ensemble led by Yo-Yo Ma for lunch. I was seeking people to pitch LiveCode as part of the coding solution. As I said yesterday, just lots of smiles. My next session was Creating 75 Million Entrepreneurs: Is This Possible? by Edward Thai. The base of the discussion was that the UN now estimates that 75 million young people are unemployed globally with the vast majority relying on small enterprises for jobs. The conclusion was that indeed the young people will take the risk, they just need guidance. I so excited to hear the experts and real entrepreneurs validate my idea. Out of these discussions of I have structured the planning app into six simple Question:

1. Who are you?
2. Who are your Customers?
3. What will you Sell?
4. How much will Sell?
5. What are your expenses?
6. Where is your money?

What is a Business Plan
A bank sees a business plan is a written description of a business’s future. A business plan conveys the business goals, the strategies use to meet them, potential problems that may confront the business and ways to solve them, the target customers for the business how market and sell to them, and finally, the amount of money required to operate the venture and keep it going until it breaks even or makes a profit.

But we need to push the idea that plans are a way to help organize ideas and tasks for the business, NOT the bank. It doesn’t matter if our users are thinking about opening a business or already operating one. By answering these questions, and going back to them often, our users will be able to navigate through troubles and also identify opportunities.

Think about it this way: if it costs you $0.5 to produce bottled orange juice and you are selling them for $1.5, then you are making a 50% gross margin! But if you only sell 100 every month, you are making $50 which could be insufficient to pay the other bills such as rent, electricity, salaries, taxes, etc. So you need to take action! You can (1) reduce your costs and/or (2) increase your sales and/or (3) increase your margins by selling at a higher price point.

Financial metrics are the language of business! You have to know them inside out so you can make sound business decisions and avoid mistakes that many entrepreneurs make. We are going to create a simple app that will help small business owners understand more clearly.

I attended a quick session name Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Hunger and Food Security. Turns out 30% of food is wasted because of inefficiencies in production and distribution of food. Most of the problem is food rotting waiting from get to market. This cost is passed on to consumers who can not afford the food, then then lower sales and more food rotting on the market shelf. There needs to be an app for this, where the farmers and market sellers can connect. Here is an idea LiveCoders!

Other sessions I quite enjoyed were India and the World, Internet without Borders, Understanding Iran and other talks from Johann Schneider, President of the Swiss Federation, Justin Trudeau, the new Prime Minister of Canada and Joe Biden, the Vice President of the US. Plus meeting many dignitaries, business leaders, NGOs and academics. I might add that I am seeing a very strong presence of Chinese and Indian attendees. This is a confirmation that they are starting to take their rightful place as principal countries of the world. Plus, considering it cost between $50,000 to $200,000 to attend a four day conference, their businesses now see themselves as top tier. [Just to be clear, I was invited, so gratis for me. The fee is way above my pay grade!!]

That was day one, and I even got a late start!! The intellectual stimulation and desire to take action is an inspiration for our business plan app. I have been the crazy guy attached to his computer trying to put together the app while at the same time absorbing all this input. So let’s see how I did on day one:

GoPlan
We are not just creating a simple app using LiveCode. My actual goal is to show how to create a profitable business using LiveCode as the app development system. By the end of the Davos conference, I hope to have my own business plan and my first app to sell. We have decided to name the business GoPlan. Not surprising, GoPlan.com was not available. So we settled on GoPlan.biz. Actually I like the name better. Consumers are getting off their attachments to the .com thing anyway.

Wireframing GoPlan.Biz
Wireframing is an extremely important phase of the app development process. Luckily LiveCode’s UI builder mostly allows you to design your app within the IDE. The key is to focus on UI elements first, before you start to code. While it’s tempting to skip this step and proceed from the design brief and information architecture directly into building your app, but it pays huge dividends to first create the app to the stage somewhere in between of conceptual planning and actual development. it is called “Wireframing”, but it can be considered the first stage of development of your LiveCode App. This will allow you to do several things far more efficiently, and the time and effort you put into this phase pays dividends in the greater scheme of things.

Who are you?
Learn
Basic Setup of Business Type, Business Name, Principal Name(s), Address
Text Summary of “Who you are”

Who are your Customers?
Learn
Text Summary of “Who are your Customers” [Examples of business]

What will you Sell?
Learn
Text Summary of Products
Add Products [Name and Description]

How much will you sell?
Name
Numbers [From Chart]

What are your expenses?
Name

What type of expense do you want to enter?
Salary, Insurance, Legal, Accounting, Automobile, Travel, Utilities…more
Numbers [From Chart]

Where is your money?
Investments [Assets]
You own [Assets]
Add Fields:
Name

What’s the type of your asset? [Have List to pick from]
Fixed asset [on/off switch]

When will you buy it?

What’s the cost of your asset?
You owe [Liability]

Download the wireframe code here.

Revolutionary Data Entry for Numbers
We have been struggling all day on what would be the best way to enter 36 months of data for the revenue and cost for each product and service the planner would offer. The first instinct would be to replicate Excel on a mobile phone. But given our target user of micro to small businesses around the world, we knew that would be a failure. Plus, using the mobile keyboard to do data entry on a phone like a spreadsheet is just not compatible and an unacceptable user experience.

So, Gurgen and I challenged ourselves and I am happy to say that 10 months of programming was more innovative and creative than 27 years. Gurgen came up with the idea to allow the user to just use their finger to move a point in the chart up and down to change the numbers. It is brilliant in it’s simplicity and ease of use – well done Gurgen.

We have attached a sample project with the code we have hacked together today and we offer it to the community to learn, but to also to help test and improve. We understand that it is not as smooth as we would like, so please contribute.

Download the chart code here.