And on what exactly do you base this statement? I get that you think it doesn't work, but we have currently had no detail on exactly what Vana's idea is, who it is aimed at and how it will work. I wouldn't be so quick to judge, unless you've actually got access to the detail. Repeatedly stating your opinions as fact doesn't make them any more credible or right.

Also, I happen to know the MD of eHarmony is involved in the final. Be interesting to see what he thinks.

We heard Sugar ask each candidate to condense their business plan down last night and explain it. Vana explained hers and it's a simple enough concept to grasp ('game' precedes seeing who you're playing with, ideally with a love match at the end of it). Any industry expert will tear it apart.

Editor of e-harmony will pinch the idea, oh, if he hadn't already thought of it.

See you on the other thread in 5.

You've heard of intellectual property and confidentiality disclosure agreements, right?

Haha part time lawyer are we?

No need to overcomplicate things. If it was lucrative, it would have already been done.

I see that Charleine's current businesses were to be kept as her sole property. That was on the first page of her business plan. It was the academies and franchises that were on offer. Even by year 5, her training academies were only go to have a turnover of around £100,000. Not much scope for profit there.

Vana's gamification of dating was playing games such as brainteasers with the other person. How would you repeatedly synchronise schedules to do that? Basically instead of having an online conversation, you play online games with them. If the games were silly and fun and you could have an online audio dialogue, it might work. You would get an idea of their sense of humour. Is the dating and the picture reveal side of it really needed?

If Richard's idea is so great, why doesn't he implement it in his current business with his brother? The 4 stages that were meant to be key to his idea were obvious ones, ie "basecamp", "sell more to your existing customers", "find new customers" and "raise you profile". Most people could come up with that list all by themselves.

Not sure what Gary would be offering people except to watch the events. That would require multiple cameras and operators. Any 2 way interaction at something like a wedding could only be done at prearranged times at the event and that could be replaced by a prerecorded video message.

Why do they think they can just easily set up franchises. What would the franchisees get in return? With places like McDonalds and Subway, it is clear what you are getting and it has a true value that is difficult to do without, eg national advertising. What could Charleine and Joseph offer that the franchisees couldn't do for themselves?

Not sure how in the final task that Joseph can launch anything worth showing. At least Vana could create a small scale prototype of the app. Might have been fun seeing Gary's idea in action.

This isn't some small client-only app for a single platform, though, or a simple PHP site that can run on a single £50 per month server. For what Vana's proposing, you'd be very lucky if £140k even covered a half-finished prototype with one or two sample games that can be used by so much as a dozen people, let alone thousands.

I'm broadly in agreement. A few comments:

Charleine's plan showed a profit of £75k in year 5 - so £37.5k to Sugar (as a 50% investor). Nowhere near enough based on a £250k investment.

I don't think Vana's app would necessarily require synchronous play. Apps like SongPop involve playing in 'turns', so it could maybe work like that?

I quite liked Richard's plan - I can see how it could benefit smaller businesses who have no idea how to grow other than to knock on doors or "work their socks off" (ahem, Charleine). Few small businesses really know anything about marketing other than placing ads in local papers or having a webpage.

Gary's idea - well, Linda Plant summed it up when she said it was "just a mobile disco". It really was.

I think often candidates latch on to franchising because it's a quick way to expand and build the kind of numbers you need for an attractive investment. But, as you say, the franchisee has to see some tangible benefit - generally a brand (McDonald's, Starbucks) or some differentiating product/process (Avon). As Mike Soutar showed Joseph, he wouldn't have been able to afford being his own franchisee!

Fundamentally, Joseph's revised plan isn't actually a new business at all - it's just an expansion of his existing business. Relatively safe but not overly exciting and I can't see it generating massive returns. But if Sugar wants to get a modest payback on his investment, it might work.

Vana will burn through the £250k in months, probably before she has earned £1 in revenue. But £250k would get the add through development and possibly a pilot phase, at which point she could target venture capital funding to push her through the next phase. If it works it will be huge, but it's a crowded marketplace with a very high failure rate.

It all comes down to whether Sugar really does want to take a risk, or whether he wants to play safe.

It depends on how interactive the game is with the other player and what type of game is being played. If it's simple brain-teasers then it won't actually be that hard to develop. If the games are more complicated then the costs go up.

The main problem I see development wise is that you are having to develop a dating App and a Game (or multiple games). That is going push up development time.

However I feel a budget of £ 140k + 32k monthly costs is still way too much. And yes, I'm an Apps Developer.

Wouldn't it conflict with his current business? I don't see how it could co-exist on the same site.


His key idea seemed to be telepresence. Projecting a hologram of a relative in Australia to a wedding party in the UK. It'd have value for over-sea relatives that didn't have the time or money to come in person. It might turn out to be a gimmick, and not as effective as Skype; it was hard to tell.

What if you hate 'games' .....?????

Oh yeah, I understood his concept. I just thought it didn't really add any value for the vast majority of punters - just a gimmick. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I noted that Gary has since gone back to work in the corporate world. I get the impression that this was something he was doing on the side after being made redundant from Tesco (as one of the references Mike Soutar was holding clearly showed), and not really a full thought through plan that he had set his heart on. Much though I didn't like Charleine and thought her plan was a non-starter, at least she was 100% behind her own plan.

Use a different app. It doesn't have to appeal to everyone.

Yes, I don't have a team, it's just me. I could do it for that cheap easily, in around 4 months or so. I've completed bigger projects than this in less time, but I'd say 4 months for a job like this, not including beta testing.

The way these companies tend to work, and I've worked for them in the past, is the actual developer who does all the work gets 10%-15%. The managers take most, and the sales team take the rest. However, go straight to the developer who is the one doing the work anyway, and save a fortune. Most IT companies are sales companies, not tech companies.

Trust me, I've worked on multi national projects with thousands upon thousands of users, I do know what I'm talking about here. I've got 23 years experience in development. 90% of tech spend is waste. The IT world has convinced people that that's how much things cost, but it's way far from reality.

Unless the apps users go into the millions, a basic £50 a month virtual private server would suffice for a long time. You can always migrate upwards. If you use PHP as the "connector" between app and database, the CPU overheads will be tiny. You could easily handle many thousands of users on a pretty basic server. I've no idea why your expectations of the capabilities of even basic servers is so low. I can only presume you've been fed the same bullshit as her.

I made an iPhone game years ago, a full developed game. It took me two days to complete it. 140k for a couple of games? These guys are con merchants, and they have everyone hooked in.

Something that's intended for the kind of scalability, as well as the scope and quality of the software produced that her business plan requires for it to have any real-world usability and commercial traction is going to go way beyond £140k in dev costs. To put in to perspective, I work in cloud computing, which as you probably know already is all about the provisioning, orchestration and management of resources for the kind of scale we're talking about for a successful internet dating business. Her business could easily spend over half a million of development costs and £30k+ a month on AWS (for example) before it's got anything even approaching the market traction and user base to turn over its first penny of revenue. Bear in mind the first several thousand full access memberships will have to be given away for free (you don't pay a subscription to join a dating site with 1 other member), therefore even after launch, the business is fundamentally required to run at a loss for some period of time.

£250k might get her a small-scale prototype with a few simple games that will have to be completely rebuilt from scratch as the business starts to attract users, but that's about the best case scenario.

I'm a software engineer with many years experience in both web and cloud and strongly disagree with you, but I'm happy to leave it there.

Yeah she somehow seemed to be the only person to not realise this.

Gary - His plan just seemed very dull to be honest. If you are planning a party and you have some family member abroad who can't attend, with things like Skype the family in that country could easily set up a link to the party and have their own party. Anyway, if you're not actually going to be at the party would you really want to sit at a computer screen watching as other people party and get drunk? It's not like you'd be able to join in with any conversations or socialise with people, I am pretty sure hologram technology does not extend to enabling Aunt Edith in Australia being able to somehow make a hologram of herself and send it to the party thousands of miles away. It was just a non starter.

Richard - He should have kept his plan simple and cleared up what he was going to do with his shares in the existing company before he came into the process. Had he not waffled so much and tried to talk his business idea up to something it clearly wasn't he might have stood a chance of getting to the final based on his performances in the tasks, he threw the opportunity away in the end and he knew it.

Charleine - Her idea was just not feasible. Claude was right, her best bet would have been to open up another salon in Plymouth or the surrounding area and branch out from there, where she already has a successful salon and a good reputation. Coming to London, which is already a saturated market when it comes to hairdressers, it would take something very special to stand out. I don't think her winning the Apprentice would have been enough to carry her, certainly not when it came to setting up a chain of salons. I mean, it's not like she'd been attending shows in London or entering competitions so people could actually see her work or her salons work and start a buzz around her. Her best bet is to stay in Plymouth for now and build from that, going to London would just be a step too far at this stage.

Vana - Her plan is the one I like the most BUT, I don't know if 250 k is anywhere near enough money to get her venture off the ground. I disagree with the people who say there isn't a target audience for this kind of dating app, I believe there is. Clearly her target market needs to aim at at least the 30 plus range, if not 40 plus. I don't believe younger people would be all that interested because generally when you're young dating and attraction is mostly based on looks first, personality second. With an older clientele, I think they'd be more open minded to getting to know a person a little bit first before seeing the picture. I believe that the app needs to include a chat feature though to enable the people playing games to talk in between. That way you can get to know someone a bit better and if you like that person based off of what you've talked about when you do get to see the person, even if you're not particularly attracted to their features, you might be willing to go on a date based off of their personality. In fact, the gaming aspect might have over complicated her plan somewhat. What might be better is a chat facility and the ability for each person to put together their own quizzes to send each other so you could learn a bit more about them and how compatible you might be then possibly you get to see their image in a couple of day's time or something. I do believe her plan has the potential to be a big money spinner BUT it is a far bigger risk than Joseph's idea as it could backfire spectacularly.

Joseph - He seemed to make the same mistake as Richard and over estimate what he could do with his plan. Now Joseph seemed to take on board very quickly that he'd over extended himself and switched his plan a bit and ultimately, that's what got him through to the final. His idea is probably the most secure out of his and Vana's, it's lower risk and lower reward but I get the feeling he is LAS favourite candidate so at this point, I'd say he is the favourite to win.

Okay, break down the costs for me. How on earth would a pretty basic app like this cost anywhere near that much money? Where is that money going?

Also, why would she need to look at cloud computing for this? It's entirely unrelated and completely unnecessary. Why would she need AWS?

Just out of curiosity, take a look at this ex apprentice website www.glasses123.co.uk, and give me an estimate for development, maintenance and server costs.

Good analysis.

I find Joseph's revised plan laudable but a little dull. It's basically just an expansion of his existing business - not a new business at all. But unlikely to burn all of the £250k, some of it will go into assets with a resale value if it all goes wrong, and certainly lower risk (and consequently lower return).

The way I view Vana's plan is that it is a punt, but one with an opportunity for Sugar to mitigate his risk. £250k gets her through the development and proof of concept stage. You then pitch to venture capitalists to back her for the big bucks she needs for launch funding - but Sugar can then downscale or pull out altogether if he wants (recouping his £250k and probably a sweetener to ensure a tidy profit). The risk then passes to the VC and Sugar is home free. Sugar can limit his risk to Vana getting a workable app that is attractive enough to draw VC funding - no need to invest more than £250k of his own money at all (although obviously he can if he wants).

It's very similar to how many tech start-ups raise their funding. A first round to develop a working prototype/concept, then a second round to get it off the ground. It's only a fictional comedy, but Silicon Valley (Sky Atlantic) offers a very good insight into how this world works.

It is called telepresence and you can buy it from Cisco. Search for it on Youtube. Large companies, presumably including Tesco where Gary worked, use it for meetings. The problem is it is hard to see there being enough demand from weddings and the like to justify the cost of hauling a lot of expensive kit across the Australian outback. As you say, in 99 per cent of cases, Skype is good enough.

Gary's proposal was really a solution in search of a problem, and getting tacked onto and mixed up with his existing mobile discos did not help.

Not really my argument but there are a couple of points that will drive costs up.

First is that storing personal information means security compliance and auditing. Taking payments can be delegated to a third party like Paypal or Worldpay.

Second is that Vana's games mean it is necessary that users can interact with each other in real time, which adds complexity (even if the games are developed for free).

Third is that she will presumably want equivalent versions for the web and mobile apps for both Apple and Android phones and tablets.

Does it need to be hosted in the cloud? No, but it needs to be hosted somewhere so that's a wash.

On the other hand, you are right that a bare-bones prototype could be knocked up quickly for far less, and perhaps will be in the final on Sunday.

I don't see the need for the games to be real-time. Song Pop and Words with Friends are two very successful examples of turn-based gameplay. I'm imagining this is how Vana's apps would work. You set up the games and the two individuals play them in their own time.

I'm not an expert in app development but I don't think parallel platform development or hosting will be show-stoppers. The bigger issues are (a) the investmemnt required to stand out from the crowd - there's a new dating app that launches (or fails) pretty much every week, as I understand it and (b) having a genuine point of difference that convinces an investor (who I don't see as being Sugar himself) to provide a second round of funding.

Well, she could spend £ 500,000 quite easily if she isn't very good at Project Management. I've seen development costs for some apps go past that and then never get released. And those had a simpler concept than this.

One of the main points of AWS is you spin up instances automatically so you don't pay for idle capacity. Spending £ 30k on AWS just from the start would be ridiculous and very good salesmanship from whoever is ripping her off.

During the first few months actual maintenance costs would be low. The main cost (as I said previously) would be advertising / marketing.

That's a very cheap website and badly coded. They still have unchecked exceptions.