Find out in our blog why we think Lord Sugar missed a trick with Vana’s plan for her dating through game playing business.
Vana had a plan for a business that developed a dating app that let users play games to run psychometric tests behind the scenes to help match them up with potential dates.
In the final episode, she asked her team to poll a number of app developers to get prices to build the app that she needed. Once she had feedback that the development costs would probably eat up all of Lord Sugar’s £250,000, Vana suggested that the £250,000 would essentially become seed funding, and once the concept was proved she would go out to gain Venture Capital investment. This meant that Lord Sugar would not own 50% of the business in the long term, and he opted not to go with her plan.
Here at AES, we are quite often faced with situations where a company needs more support and development from us than they can afford. Our approach is to form a long term partnership with the company by pricing the system they need via a SaaS model. This means that we look at the work that needs to b e done, and supply three prices:
- A price to cover part of building or configuring the system.
- A price to licence the use of the system on a monthly basis including hosting and helpdesk.
- A price for ongoing development work as/if required.
Building systems and apps in this way lets our customer get their business development started and get to proof of concept or complete clinical trialing so that they can either begin to make profits, or move to bring in further investment.
We share the risk of our partner’s venture while keeping their initial costs low until the customer has reached the point where their business is successful, they can then buy the IP rights and source code to the software at our best estimate of market value.
You can find out more about how we manage systems that manage hi-tech businesses and which can include apps at https://www.aes.co.uk/software/hi-tech/