Good afternoon, I am working on a web site project in a team of people. I am a "programmer" and I had an argument with the "marketing expert". (We are all just students). He sais, that he cannot create a business plan, because we cannot get ahold of the project owner for quite some time now and we do know how much capital is at our disposal. We basically only need the finances for advertisements. In my oppinion, he could start working even though we do not know the ammount. Here are my arguments: 1. We only need a certain ammount of advertisements - we are building a social network (only for a certain domain of people) snd we hope that from some point on the advertisements won't be neccesary 2. If we do not have enought users, the social network is doomed. 3. Nobody wants to spend more money than they have to. 4. If we do not have enought money, we have to search for an investor. 5. In my oppinion, it is possible to estimate the money needed for the advertisements based on the purpose od the project and the targeted groum of people (young, mostly males) His arguments: 1. The knowledge of this kind of data is a fatal aspect of marketing. 2. If I started the business plan without it, it would be like you writing code based on a bad explenation of the project - most of the code would be useless and this process would be inefficinet for the project. I have to wait and cannot do my job. What is your oppinion? Is it neccesary to know the ammount of capital we have? Thank you very much for your time, Peter.
One approach would be to make three different estimates of how much capital you have. A low budget. A medium budget. And high budget. Sketch out the project at three levels and cost the individual components. You will then have a framework for decision making once the real budget is known.
Thanks for the aswer. Our discussion has proceeded into a more philosofical level, though. Is the business plan harder to make if you don't know the exact budget?