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Capture mid-stream decisions (north star intent, owner-first buyer, agent-mediated discovery path, free checkup flywheel) so conversation progress is durable on the branch.
4.2 KiB
geolocal.io — Business Plan (working draft)
Branch: planning-rev2
Status: In progress — conversation checkpoint, not final
Purpose: One durable place for the clean plan. Existing docs on main are raw material; this file is what we iterate.
How we work this file
- Checkpoint here after every few solid decisions (or when a phrase must not be lost).
- Prefer revising this over spawning parallel strategy docs.
- Mark unknowns as open questions. Do not invent market numbers here.
1. North star (wording still open)
Intent (stable): Enable local businesses to be discovered and recommended by AI assistants.
Still wordsmithing the exact sentence. The job does not change while the phrasing does.
2. What the company is
Infrastructure — not a consumer destination.
- Host structured business truth so AI assistants can discover, understand, and recommend local businesses (services and local retail with real-world presence).
- Give the business a simple way to point at that truth (no servers for them to run).
- Orchestrate booking / payment / related partners where needed; do not rebuild Calendly or Shopify.
- Stay invisible to end consumers; win by being useful to agents and trustworthy to owners.
Not: another Yelp/Google for human browsing attention.
3. Who we serve
Primary customer: the business owner.
By extension:
- Someone in their organization acting for them
- A partner they already trust (agency, SEO, chamber, tourism board)
Partners are a path to the owner, not a different product.
4. How demand shows up (two moments)
- Presence for other AIs — When a consumer’s assistant asks for a local plumber / salon / store, structured geolocal data can be consulted and acted on.
- Owner (or their AI) asks for help — Emerging path: “How do we help our business be discovered by AI?” Geolocal should invest in scenarios where the owner’s own AI can diagnose and set that up — not only human sales through agencies.
Same north star; different moments of truth.
5. Wedge and flywheel (direction agreed)
Preferred wedge: a free AI-visibility checkup.
Why:
- Shows immediate value / need
- Builds critical mass
- Small free actions amplify adoption
Long-term reputation bet: become so useful and dense that AI systems default to checking geolocal for local-class queries — analogous to how they lean on Yelp or Foursquare today.
Strategic read (not pricing gimmick): free usefulness → coverage → agent trust → more local queries resolved via geolocal → more owners want in → denser graph.
Open — first free win after checkup
Unresolved on purpose (checkpoint before answering):
- A. Free checkup plus a small durable win (e.g. basic presence live, structured hours, minimal genre pack)
- B. Diagnosis only, with a clear line on what paid unlocks
Lean toward A if the goal is critical mass and “AI knows to check geolocal,” because empty scores do not densify the graph. Final call: Ty.
6. Business plan audience (still open)
Clarify what this document must optimize for first:
- Internal clarity (founders / operators)
- Investors
- Partners / channels
Can serve more than one later; pick the primary reader for v1 structure.
7. Source material (do not duplicate blindly)
Treat as inputs, not competing sources of truth while this draft is live:
NORTH_STAR.mddocs/strategy/CANONICAL_STRATEGY.mddocs/gtm/,docs/investors/,docs/product/docs/archive/— historical only
If something here conflicts with CANONICAL_STRATEGY.md, resolve on purpose in a later pass — do not silently fork forever.
8. Checkpoint log
| When | What landed |
|---|---|
| 2026-09-15 | North star intent; owner-first buyer; partners as extension; agent-mediated “get discovered” path; free checkup wedge; reputation / critical-mass flywheel; open question on free durable win vs diagnosis-only |
Next conversation topics
- Decide free win after checkup (A vs B above)
- Primary reader for v1 of this plan
- Offer / packaging (free vs paid) without inventing numbers
- 90-day proof: what “reputable enough that AI checks us” requires in coverage and quality