Building Fika in Public: Our Business Plan + Free Template

Today I’m going to share with you the process I followed to create the initial business plan for Fika.

I say initial because we don’t really have any KPI that assure us that we will be able to achieve this business plan.

But we need something to work with and reforecast every month or quarter if needed.

What is Fika?

Before diving into the business plan, I should explain what Fika actually is. Fika is the first project of Ramensoft, a place for writers and non-writers to create their own space and share whatever they want: knowledge, expertise, life experiences, random stories, or even a poem.

Our second goal is to help our users reach as many people as possible, so they can build a community around their content and grow their audience.

So if Fika is the first project of Ramensoft, how does the business plan look? We have a general business plan for the company and then a sub-business plan for each project. This helps us track the success or failure of every project, estimate (or at least try to estimate) our burn rate, and get closer to the dreamed break-even.

Ramensoft Cash

We have cash for two years. That runway covers the salaries of two of the three founders and gives us room to hire one or two people in the coming months. It also lets us invest a bit in marketing: tools, freelancers, and paid ads, so we can move faster.

How much we invest in people, services, and marketing will depend on how each project performs. If a project works, it gets fuel. If it does not, we rethink. The more a project generates, the more we reinvest in it. No secrets, no magic.

The vision is to be self-sufficient and bootstrap. We want Fika and the rest of the Ramensoft projects to grow because they are valuable, not because we raised money. We are not looking for external investment right now, although we are not closing the door forever. If someday raising helps us bring the product to more people without compromising what makes it special, we will consider it.

For now, the mission is “simple”: build great products, learn fast, and stay alive long enough to win.

The business plan template

Before I joined Ramensoft, I worked for six years at Factorial HR as Global marketing director. Back then, it was an HR software startup. Today it is a European unicorn.

There we used an internal document called “samba”. In that document we tracked everything at a top level: leads, MQL, SQL, clients, MRR, churn, marketing costs, salaries, and so on. It was not beautiful, but it was extremely useful because it gave us a clear picture of how the business was performing at any moment.

The document I created for us at Ramensoft is inspired by that structure. You can adapt it to your needs, improve it, delete the lines that are not relevant, or add new ones if your context requires it. The important part is not the format. The important part is having a single source of truth where you can look at the business and understand what is working and what is not.

How to use the JR business plan excel template.

This template was created based on a B2B SaaS company with a sales team. That is why you will see concepts like MQL, SQL or ARPU, but you can adapt it to your own needs, KPIs and business model. If you are not familiar with any of these terms, you can check the marketing vocabulary here.

It is also important to mention that this is a general plan. At Factorial we used to break down these numbers by groups of channels to understand where growth was coming from and where we should double down.

• Organic, which included all marketing channels except paid.

• Paid, which included every channel where marketing was investing money, such as Google Ads, TikTok Ads, paid referrals, and others.

• Outbound, business generated by the outbound team.

• Channel, business generated by Factorial partners. It worked almost like an affiliate program, although not exactly.

With all that said, using it is super easy. Just:

Jokes aside, this is not a lead magnet. But new subscribers are always welcome, because I am going to share our whole adventure building Fika in public.

You just need to copy the Google Drive excel template here.

Everything is already connected with formulas. Conversion rates, costs, and the rest are calculated automatically. It also includes a monthly view, a quarterly view, and a yearly view so you can track the evolution of your business at different levels.

You just need to edit Goal & Monthly results

Fika business plan

As I said before, you can adapt the template to your needs. And if you improve it, I would love to see your version, so do not hesitate to share it with me 🙂

For Fika, this is the adapted version we are using:

At Ramensoft we do not have a sales team, so tracking MQL or SQL does not make much sense right now.

What we do have is a product with more than one possible path to generate income in the future. On one side, the writer path with a subscription model. On the other side, the reader path, where creators will eventually be able to earn money from their publications. #spoyler

We are also exploring other potential revenue lines. For example, a sponsored newsletter program with revenue share, or even a personalized ads model that respects the writer and the reader. None of this is locked yet. We prefer to experiment instead of pretending we already know the answer.

Right now the priority is crystal clear. We need people to write, publish, and feel at home on the platform. Once we prove that Fika creates value, the business will follow. First we build something meaningful. Then we earn the right to scale.

You know how hard the beginning is. So if you want to help, you can subscribe to my newsletter for more spam del bueno. And if you really want to support us (the true supporter level), share it with your friends.

In the next update I will share what we did this month and, of course, all the numbers from November. Every euro we invested to generate our first active users will be there.

I will see you there. Thanks for building this with us.