Currently, Skooppa is like an embryo, incubating, waiting to be born. There is a load of information buried in its DNA, actually created in our, the founders, minds. These ideas and concepts will define what that embryo will grow up to be, but there are so many factors, which may affect the growth and the outcome.
One thing is certain, we want direly to make Skooppa, our baby, a reality. Skooppa needs to make its goal and get online communities to the next level to get more “air time” from its users and to be the better social network they can be. We really want to make this happen.
Our intentions are genuine, but we are dependent and must work with “external forces and limits” like everyone else. For instance, we need the tool “money”, to make things happen. We need great people with great skills to make things happen. We need great leaders, with great visions, to guide them. And we need great supporters, who want it all to happen too. As we work on all of these, this is our informal forward looking intentions.
The Rough Plan
Skooppa is following a Stage-Gate project management philosophy. This is what it looks like from a very top level.
For the first two stages, we have taken about a year to gather our thoughts, make plans and set down ideas and concepts. We’ve also put together this website, because we also knew we are going to need some assistance. Actually, we’re going to need a lot of assistance.
As you can see from the image above, we are about a quarter of the way into making Skooppa a reality. If the rest of the time line were to fit across the rest of the plan, then we should be ready with our service in about 3 years. This is probably too long, but more than likely closer to how it will pan out. However, we’re shooting for a bit tighter timing, for our first service, the Skooppa Platform.
The First Next Step – Get Seeding Milestone
But first, in order for us to start building mock-ups to test our theories and concepts, we need financial seeding. We need some starting capital, which we will use to pay for cloud infrastructure and consultant fees and to pay our programmers. We will then master our business plan and we will determine our costs to do business (and also our initial planned pricing). To get this seed capital, we are turning to crowd funding.
This is a paramount milestone. We will be faced with the first “do or die” point, once we are finished with this milestone. We need to make sure the foundation we are building is the right one, so the rest of the project can simply fall into place. And although we don’t believe in hope in business, we hope online community owners will be willing to invest in our future, even at this point in time.
Skooppa Level 1 – The Platform
“Skooppa Level 1” is what we are calling the first release of Skooppa, which we have determined can be a marketable, usable and valuable service. It will be the core platform and its functionalities. It will be the basis to create any web application or websites on a powerful web serving stack. This stack is what we call the Skooppa Core Infrastructure (SCI). We intend to have this project fork done in 2 years, after a successful seeding and first round financing.
Skooppa Level 2 – The Skooppa User Network
Although the two Levels will be worked on in parallel at some point, we realize we need a good number of users to get the Skooppa User Network going. We feel putting together the network and the tools and infrastructure necessary for the Skooppa network to work needs to be a separate project and will take a bit longer than the platform. We are shooting for a release about 6 months to a year after Skooppa Level 1.
These goals are very preliminary and I also realize this is all very high level, but we do want to be a transparent as possible for you, without undermining our business potential. We want to definitely show you, we know what we are doing. We want your trust.
Although we see Skooppa as much more than just a business, we are again bound by the “external forces and limits” I mentioned above. To get Skooppa done and done right, we have to be a business and we see that actually as a fun side challenge. Making Skooppa real and very useful to its users is our main goal. Making it a fair, transparent, trustworthy business is just a part of making Skooppa happen.
If you have any comments or questions about our plans, please join our community and post a thread. We’ll love to answer them. That IS what we, as online community owners, are all about! Isn’t it?
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