Worked example — go-to-market & business plan for an AI-SaaS startup

This is one project worked end-to-end. We invent a small but realistic startup — Cuaderno, an AI meeting-notes assistant for European SMEs — and run it through the whole toolkit of Introduction to Business Management: market structure, the strategy frameworks (SWOT, PESTEL, Porter's Five Forces), the Business Model Canvas, a worked break-even and unit-economics analysis (contribution margin, LTV/CAC), a BCG portfolio call, and a one-page investor summary. Every framework is filled in with concrete numbers so you can see how the analysis is actually done, not just what the boxes are called. Where a number can be visualised, we link the matching interactive demo.

What you produce

• A completed Business Model Canvas and a one-page investor summary with headline metrics.
• A diagnosed external/internal environment: PESTEL, SWOT, and a scored Porter Five Forces.
• A defensible break-even and unit-economics model (contribution margin, CAC, LTV, payback).
• A BCG / portfolio recommendation on where to invest as the product line grows.

This page is the applied counterpart to the course outline; it is exactly the kind of artifact Groupwork 2 asks for — a complete business plan defended in a pitch (see M5 and Sessions 26–29).

1. Scenario & assumptions

Before any framework, fix the facts. A model is only as honest as the assumptions feeding it, so we state them up front and reuse the same numbers everywhere downstream.

The venture. Cuaderno is a B2B SaaS product. It joins video calls, transcribes them, and produces structured minutes, action items, and a searchable knowledge base — tuned for Spanish- and English-speaking SMEs (5–250 employees) in the EU. It is sold as a monthly per-seat subscription.

Market structure. The market is monopolistic competition (Session 2): many differentiated sellers — Otter, Fireflies, the incumbents' native tools (Zoom, Teams Copilot) — low but non-zero switching costs, and no single price-setter. That structure tells us, before any spreadsheet, that long-run economic profit is competed away unless we hold a genuine differentiator (here: EU data residency + Spanish-first quality).

Operating assumptions (the single source of truth)

Market sizing — TAM / SAM / SOM

We size bottom-up to stay honest. There are roughly 1.5M SMEs in our target EU countries that run knowledge-work meetings; at €160/account/year… per month that is the addressable spend. We take a deliberately conservative obtainable share.

The Year-1 target of 450 accounts is <0.2% of SAM — credible, and the SOM gives a ceiling for the fundraising story without over-promising.

2. Strategic analysis worked out

Three lenses, in order: PESTEL (the macro environment), Porter's Five Forces (the industry), and SWOT (the firm). Each maps to Module 2, Session 4.

2.1 PESTEL — the macro environment

PESTEL scans forces the firm cannot control but must plan around. We mark each factor as a tailwind, headwind, or watch-item.

2.2 Porter's Five Forces — industry attractiveness

We rate each force 1 (weak / favourable) to 5 (strong / threatening). The mean force drives attractiveness: lower mean = more headroom for profit. This is the framework behind the five-forces demo.

Mean force $= \dfrac{4+3+3+3+4}{5} = 3.4$ out of 5 — a moderately tough industry. The two pressure points are rivalry (crowded category) and supplier power (cloud + foundation-model providers can raise prices and even compete downstream). Strategic response: differentiate on EU-compliance/Spanish quality to soften rivalry, and keep models swappable (open-weights fallback) to blunt supplier power. Buyers have only medium power because seats are cheap relative to the value of recovered meeting time.

2.3 SWOT — internal vs external, synthesised

SWOT folds the PESTEL/Porter findings together with firm-specific facts. Strengths/Weaknesses are internal; Opportunities/Threats are external.

Strategic read (TOWS): match the strongest Strength to the biggest Opportunity — lead go-to-market with "EU-hosted, Spanish-first" against incumbents who are weak exactly there. Defend the key Threat (bundling) by going deep on compliance and workflow integration where a generic bundled feature cannot follow.

3. Business model & financials, step by step

Now the quantitative core: the Business Model Canvas to fix the model, then break-even and unit economics with worked numbers. Mirrors M2 S6 (canvas) and M4 S19 (finance) / M5 S23 (SaaS economics).

3.1 Business Model Canvas

3.2 Contribution margin & break-even

Each seat sells for €20 and costs €6 to serve, so the unit contribution margin is €14 (a 70% margin). Fixed costs are €42,000/month. The break-even volume is the point where total contribution covers fixed cost:

At 8 seats per account that is 375 paying accounts to break even — €60,000 MRR. Our Year-1 target of 450 accounts (3,600 seats) clears it. This is exactly the curve in the break-even demo — drag $F$, $p$ and $v$ there to see how the break-even point moves.

Note fixed cost rises modestly in Year 2 (to €48k as the team grows) while contribution scales with volume — the operating leverage that makes SaaS attractive.

3.3 Unit economics — CAC, LTV, payback

Subscriptions live or die on whether a customer is worth more than it costs to win. We work per account (8 seats → €160/mo, €112/mo contribution at the 70% margin). With 4% monthly churn the average customer lifetime is $1/0.04 = 25$ months.

3.4 SaaS growth — does MRR compound?

MRR next month = this month's MRR surviving churn, plus new MRR: $MRR_{t+1} = MRR_t(1-c) + \text{new}$. With €60k MRR, 4% churn and €10k new MRR/month, the steady state where growth stalls is $\text{new}/c = 10{,}000 / 0.04 = €250{,}000$ MRR — the ceiling at the current spend. To grow past it we lift new-MRR or cut churn. Explore this in the SaaS growth demo.

4. Results & recommendation

Pull the strands together into a portfolio call and a one-page investor brief.

4.1 BCG / portfolio call

Cuaderno's product line, placed on the BCG growth-share matrix (BCG demo): the core notes product is a Question Mark today — high market growth, still-low relative share — and the strategy is to fund it hard to push it toward Star. The planned CRM/ERP integration add-on is a future bet (also a Question Mark). There is no Cash Cow yet, which is why outside funding is required.

4.2 Recommendation

4.3 One-page investor summary

5. How it maps to the course learning outcomes

Every step above exercises a stated learning objective and a specific session. Click a module pill to jump to the course outline.

6. Extensions

Ways to push the project further — each ties to a later session or a demo.

• Sensitivity analysis. Re-run break-even and LTV/CAC if churn rises to 6% or CAC to €600. At what point does LTV/CAC fall below 3×? (Finance, S19.)
• Pricing & elasticity. Test a €15 and €30 price using the elasticity demo; how does revenue and break-even volume respond?
• Cost curve at scale. Add a scale penalty (support load, infra steps) and find profit-maximising output with the cost-curve demo.
• Org design. Plan the Year-2 org (span of control, layers) with the org-tree demo — links to M3 · S13.
• Internationalization. Pick an entry mode (direct vs partner) for a second EU market (M5 · S25).
• Blue Ocean move. Apply the eliminate-reduce-raise-create grid to escape head-on rivalry (M2 · S5).

7. References

• Osterwalder, A. & Pigneur, Y. — Business Model Generation (the Business Model Canvas). Source for the canvas used in §3.1; see Session 6, Strategyzer.
• Porter, M. E. — Competitive Strategy & "The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy", HBR. Basis for the Five Forces scoring in §2.2 (Session 4).
• Boston Consulting Group — "What Is the Growth Share Matrix?" Portfolio framework used in §4.1 (Session 8).
• Abascal, E. & Aguirreamalloa, X. — Finance for Managers, McGraw-Hill. Break-even & profitability methods, §3.2 (Session 19).
• Croll, A. & Yoskovitz, B. — Lean Analytics. SaaS metrics — CAC, LTV, churn, MRR — used in §3.3–3.4 (Session 23).
• Sequoia Capital — "Writing a Business Plan / 10-slide pitch deck". Structure of the investor summary in §4.3 (Session 26).
• Dinarés García, J. — Introduction to Business Management, IE University BCSAI, 2025–26. Course syllabus this project is grounded in — SYLLABUS.pdf.

Figures are illustrative base-case assumptions for a worked teaching example, not a forecast of a real company.