What are your opinions on the business plans.
Charleine. Her Salon business academy . I know nothing about this so I cant comment, but it does seem to be a viable proposition. I think she could move to London after being on the apprentice and doing well here. Most women dont just go for the hairdressing it is also a social occasion for them and many would go to her.
Gary. I cant really understand what is song and dance is all about. What exactly is he doing that hasnt been done before.
Richard. He already has a business which seems to be helping other businesses. He talks in riddles and seems to be very 'dense'. He was warned that he cant have a competing business. He tried to say it was something 'different' , but if one doesnt understand what the first business is about one wont understand how it is different. How he can advise others how to run a business and get paid for it beats me. Maybe his brother is made of 'better' stuff. He certainly didnt want to 'leave' him.

The other two finalists I am sure will be well discussed on here.

Joseph seems to be running a plain plumbing business like Joanna's cleaning business. This is a very crowded market and I cant see what he can bring to the table what others dont have. What exactly is he trying to offer that would entice others to join him. Why cant they do it themselves without him.

Vana. This is more interesting. I think it is an excellent idea that people should first get to know each other without seeing each other not to be blinded by 'beauty'. I have no idea how she expects to go about it or what expertise she has in this field. Maybe after the final task we will know more. There must hundreds of dating sites and many free ones. It is not a good idea of telling them in advance what one expects to do. They can copy it much quicker than she can make it. I am sure LS will have some dating experts in the audience who will give their opinions.
If I was to do this, and like it was said it would be very costly. I would buy an existing small dating site and build on it from there.

Vana's sounds awful to me. You have to play games with the prospective date to open up their picture properly?

If I spent an hour (or however long these games take) to get the picture to open, and then find I don't find the person attractive - I wouldn't bother doing another one!

Complete waste of time...

Charleine, I can't see it tbh. Perhaps if she had already started an academy elsewhere and that had some turnover to show the leap to London was worth it, but she hasn't. If she had more than one branch of her salon then the idea of a franchise might be worth a look, but it seems she wants to ignore the middle part of business growth and with her unstable personality I'm not sure she's ready for that pressure.

Gary, where to begin, I would like him to explain how you are doing big nights including holograms and what I assume to be a laser show for a few hundred quid a pop. It came across as a merger between Skype and a rave in the early 90s (just without the drugs to make you see things). All in all it's not an idea that has any exclusivity and he doesn't seem to have taken into account the technology costs.

Richard, so his idea turned out to be taking small businesses marketing money and making sure it was used wisely? He sold it like it was a pyramid scheme, a pyramid in the form of a volcano.

Joseph, okay it has potential but maybe not large enough for LAS' tastes.

Vana, sorry no. Gaming app = yes. Dating app = yes. Combining the two I don't think will work. In my mind people that use dating sites and apps do it for convenience, and what is convenient about playing games until you see a face of a potential match? In saying that I can see it having a fad element to it that might make it popular for five minutes.

The hairdressing academy sounds particularly far-fetched. Apart from running a salon, does she have teaching experience? I just looked at one of these academies online, and they offer basic and specialised training courses in the theory and practice of all aspects of hairdressing and beauty, leading to various qualifications. So apart from renting the premises, she would have to employ a fair number of trained teachers, which would be very costly.

I cant agree. The idea like I wrote is to get to know the person before you see them. Many people spend many hours before finding their correct match and dont give up at the first one. If you were seriously looking to marry and stay married I think you would agree.

Gary's idea, which I do not think Lord Sugar understood, involved a new technology called telepresence that is used for remote meetings in business. Gary planned to take this and use it for social events like weddings.

From what little detail we were shown of Gary's plan, it seemed impractical and he was not charging enough to make it viable at the likely (to me) demand levels.

My impression (which may be wrong owing to the way the programme was edited) was that Gary expected everyone to know what telepresence is, but no-one did, and Gary did not realise he needed to explain it.

Vana's idea simply won't work. In fact it's a terrible idea. Nothing more than a fad.

First, the entire suggestion she can make a profit in six months - ludicrous. She doesn't have the budget for the advertising, let alone the development.

And I know I wouldn't want to play games with "like-minded" people before I see their picture. It might be a niche, but the whole suggestion of NOT seeing a picture of someone is just nonsense. I should say I don't particularly care about looks, but I'd sure as hell want to see at LEAST a picture before I commit any time to a person online.

Again, they could target non-shallow people who are looking for love and not a quick shag, they might make it work, but there are precious few customers out there with that level of time...

What is telepresence? I've never heard of it (just like LS and all the interviewers it seems). To me Gary's business plan sounded like he wanted to charge people £300 to call someone on Skype!

Agreed. For me this was the most interesting idea. They were talking holograms, but next year Virtual Reality will be a big thing and that will open more opportunities. If you have relatives in Australia, getting them over here would be expensive, and take more time than they might be able to spare, so using telepresence could solve a real problem that would be worth some money to the customer. Not a lot, though, because you are competing with things like Skype.

I agree his idea wasn't explained well and got lost in the "mobile disco" element. Also, if no-one is doing it today I think that's because holograms suck. And next year the competition from VR will be huge.

Vana has a good idea, but 140k to develop the app? She is being absolutely ripped off, that's five times what I would charge as a professional app developer. There is no need for it to cost anywhere near that much. As for 32k a month running costs...for what? Servers?

Sounds like she has little expertise and has been utterly bullshitted by an IT sales team.

Are you serious? I've had quotes from teams for apps for my website and they're 5 grand without even blinking - for something super simple.

You think you and your team could code a complete dating app with all the extras for much less? It would take months of work and time.

Vana has, I think, misunderstood the hype around gamification and what it means, which is taking elements from games (such as scoring) into other applications. Vana seemed to be literally incorporating whole games and puzzles.

She's probably told people that she's going to get £ 250,000 from Lord Alan and then asked them how much they would charge.

It really depends on the spec and how much the games figure in it. Dating apps aren't rocket science.

The hard bit is going to be getting users. There's no point being on a dating app that doesn't have potential dates. She should be spending a lot more on advertising than the actual coding.

She's also missing the obvious point that the sort of people who play video games tend to be geeky, socially dysfunctional and not terribly attractive. If I was a single man looking for a woman, finding out she had an interest in gaming would be an instant turnoff.

Let's be honest if you had a choice between banging a hot chick on Tinder or playing Pacman with a spotty geek on Vana's website, not many would choose the latter!

Indeed. However if I spent hours getting to know someone - and really liked them - only to then find out after gaming with them that I don't find them attractive - I would be gutted. What a waste of my time. Maybe you're right and people won't give up and carry on - but I certainly wouldn't. I would want to see what someone looks like before I talk to them. Tinder (that big one they mentioned last night) works on that principle does it not?!

Also many people dont want it to be known that they are on a dating site. I am sure they also use 'false' photos. Like this they dont have to worry.

There's an early shot in the episode which shows projected year 5 profits of £75k, of which Sugar would receive half. As a rate of return on a £250k investment, that's not attractive. Even if she projected £75k profit in each of the first 5 years (she doesn't), that's a 7-year payback period (more likely 8 or 9) - most investors would expect to recoup their investment in 5 at most, ideally 3-4.

Financials aside, the flaws in Charleine's plan were fairly exposed in the episode. Her answer to every concern was that she would "absolutely work my socks off". While her drive was laudable that's simply not good enough for an investor.

That drove us mad too. Just meaningless waffle from a small time Welsh girl, too emotionally unstable to compete at this level.

That might have been a valid argument ten years ago, or if Vana were suggesting matchmaking through Call of Duty multiplayer sessions, but nowadays practically everybody and his mother games on smartphones.

Spot on. Who has time to 'play games'?! Whether you want to blow your beans via tinder or meet the love of your life via a proper dating site, do you really want to have to work to see photos of chicks? Nope.

Actually, I can see it working with a slightly older demographic - the kind of professional who doesn't want to waste time going on ill-matched dates. Dating's a huge market - there's room for something a bit different like this.

Well as someone who's used dating sites, I beg to differ. Professionals can tell all they need to know by someones 'personal statement' and a picture. They don't need some algorithm knocked up by Vana to tell them who's suitable. You can do that by exchanging a few messages.

You're entitled to disagree. But maybe you're not the target market?

Nobody is the target market.