The business plan of our project is as follows:

Executive Summary:
Zen Event is a geo-social networking app, that provides event management solutions. Our team is a set of experienced and dedicated software professionals. We aim in providing undivided, user-friendly application for our clients. Our services include event management, social networking and location tracking. We aim at gaining rich harmony with the app users by addressing their needs, suggestions and queries efficiently.

Products and Services:
Zen Event is aimed at providing the following services as a successful social networking event management app:

• Meet the current and future requirements of the industry
• Scale with the business and needs
• Model security
• Best possible price

Marketing Plan:
In order to have an effective marketing plan for our app, we analyzed our target market via existing social networks itself and found the following:

Economics:
At present, no matter a company is large or small, is focusing on collaborative websites including, but not limited to social networks. “Today, it seems that if your company is not using social media, you’re at risk of falling woefully behind the competition and missing out on significant opportunities to engage thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of rabid consumers who are just waiting to hear what you have to say” (Source: Grensing-Pophal, L.. (2009, November). Social Media: Investing in What Works. Information Today, 26(10), 1,42. Retrieved April 9, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global.
Essentially, in the case of web as a social forum, it is a win-win situation for the user and the businesses.

Strategy:
We have chosen promotion as a marketing strategy, which is consistent with our niche.

Advertising:
We aim to advertise directly through posting in the existing social networks and indireclty by creating groups or pages for subscribers and fans to join and increase our network.

Low-cost methods:
We plan to provide our app as a free event management service for the initial time period, until a good amount of users are earned. Then, make it a freemium wherein, events involving less than 50 members could be managed free of cost and charge on high count of attendees.

Customers:
We target customers of almost all age groups, gender and location with any social class and occupation, who want to plan/organize an event of any kind, especially tours with friends. For Business customers who want to advertise through our app, we have certain factors like size of the firm, quality, technology and price preferences.

Competitors:
Competitive analysis shows that there are many event management apps in the market, and we have categorized some as competitors based on factors such as company reputation, location, price and stability. But the Venn diagrams can be expressed as three sets of apps: those which target only a specific event, those which are not social networking apps and those which do not integerate location based services. The intersect forms a few and we are happy that our app is one among them.

Budget:
We have an estimated budget of around 1000 GBP. This estimation is based on Freelance social networking budget. The initial cost involves development, testing, environment setup and maintenance and the resources. Once the app is rolled out, our projected initial cash flow for year 1 may be influenced by:

• operating expenses
• sales and marketing expenses
• taxes
• profit from advertisers
• payroll

From year 2, we are predicting a profit of 10 percent of initial budget.