When I look at my market definition from a previous post, I feel that it’s time to start working more on a concrete mission and vision statement.

The topic of defining a vision and mission is a bit daunting, but given the scope of making a short vision and mission statement just for myself basically, it should be solvable. After all I don’t believe it should be carved in stone. What would then happen if I reach them?

Vision and mission statements are the two fundamental questions of “what do we want to do?” and “how do we do it?”. There should always be a goal to strive for and when you reach it you set yourself a new one.

What is your vision?

Delivering educational entertainment

What is your mission?

Developing games for mobile devices, that educates and entertains. Bringing original ideas to life, that encourages learning of knowledge and developing new skills.

References

If you’re interested in learning a bit more about formulating a vision and mission statement, have a look at this Mindtools article.

Since my last post I’ve been thinking about formalizing a mission and vision for where I want to take this. It seems a lot better than just having a rather vague idea and just start working on something without having an eye on the finish line. For the uninitiated the mission and vision should answer two important questions for any company; what the company want to do and how they want to do it.

Laying out the groundwork

Before anything else I need to consider what defines the market I want to be in. A formal definition should be suitable, to give some boundaries for some of the market analysis I plan on doing after this.

My basic idea was that I’m aiming for customers that are interested in entertainment on mobile devices, more specifically games. I do realize that “entertainment on mobile devices” not only covers Android devices, but also IOS, Windows and probably a few others that I haven’t thought of. It also covers both games, movies, news and a whole bunch of other stuff. But the thing is that Android devices will be in competition with all those other devices and any day a new gadget may come along that will draw potential customers away from where I’d be able to target them, and ignoring all these competitors would be like closing my eyes hoping someone doesn’t steal my pie. The same goes for games, that could also be replaced with other forms of entertainment. This brings me to my market definition: “Entertainment on Mobile Devices”.

Someone may be able to second guess this as being too broad a definition, but I think it’s a good one to get started of on. Yup, I’ll go with that 🙂

I’ve been working on developing a strategy, since having a plan is vital for running a company and reaching my goals. In my opinion it’s like playing chess. If you want to win you need to have one, no matter if it’s good or bad.

In plain terms I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do and how I want to do it 🙂

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it”

Since what I want to do is develop games, I see a need to focus a bit more than just Apps in general, so I’ve decided to go for Apps on Android. This should help me minimize the number of skills needed to get something published in the first place, instead of just stating that I want to generally develop Apps or even more broadly just saying games development. Secondly I’m a proponent of Android and thus really wanted to at least make something for that particular platform. Thirdly, Google has a nice distribution platform for Apps, which gives me the possibility for targetting a potentially big audience.

So where do I go from here?

There’s still quite a bit of things that I need to consider. For one I haven’t formalized my mission and vision statement. Furthermore I believe you got to know or at least have considered a few things like what being in a certain market requires, what can affect your business, what your competitors are doing and what your core competencies are. But that’s got to go on my to do list for now 😉