I know I’m bad at teaching others. Even so, about once a year someone foolishly requests a lecture from me. In this case, aspiring young creators come to see me and ask “how to write a proposal."
In the first place, what is a proposal? This is what it is to me:
It is one of the tools to communicate your ideas to people or groups with the power to decide, to let them judge the feasibility of a project, to be granted the cost and time needed for investigation, research and development of the project. Most are just a few sheets of paper with texts, pictures, and tables, or now it can be data formatted by PowerPoint.
There are four important points in this definition.
- The proposal is read by someone who has the power to approve it.
- A proposal is a tool to convey its intent and content.
- The purpose of a proposal is to convince the person who reads it that it is worth spending time and money on it
- The fourth is the most important one, so I'll write it at the end of this column.
◆ People in high positions are busy!
A proposal is not a kind of a memo to keep down your ideas, nor a summary of those ideas reorganized. You should write it 100% for the person who reads it, not for yourself.
The people in a position to make the final decision on the feasibility of projects are very busy. They always have plenty of deals besides your suggestion, and more than half of them are urgent. So when writing your proposal, think like this, "People who read this are the busiest in the world. Perhaps their hourly wage is 100,000 yen."
Actually, if they are not interested in the cover page with the tagline and title, they will throw it away in a second. If you don’t catch their fancy with the second page’s sales point summary (no more than 3!), it will be put in the trash. It takes about 30 seconds up to here. The maximum time for reviewing the summary of the proposal on page 3 is three minutes. If the reader turns over to the fourth page, congratulations! Your proposal has overcome the three first hurdles and its outline is at least roughly understood. The judge is now looking for rough patches to make a decision on the feasibility of the proposal.
Some may be surprised that their masterpiece proposal they spent days or even years writing gets only three minutes of attention. Even harder to believe that it would go to the trash immediately. However, I have personally seen it happen twice in my half-century life, what was a project a few seconds ago and turned into confetti that flew in the air of the conference room. And I realized: the world's busiest people, who are paid 100,000 yen per hour, are not necessarily nice people and hate wasting their precious time.
◆ Let's Check the Actual Proposal
About 20 years ago, I first wrote a memo for the project Hero must die. It was a few years after that I made the proposal. I took it to various companies, but on average, it took about five minutes to go to the trash. So, tired, I put the proposal up on my homepage (now closed because I’m tired of managing it) half as a joke. The title was "Someone, please buy “Hero must die."
A few years later, I deleted the published proposal when it was decided to make as a mobile application... Yet, some people have kept copies. If you search for “Someone, please buy Hero must die.", anybody can see it. Where’s the copyright? (lol)
Although it went to the trash in five minutes, it had cleared the three minute wall. So, the selling points and the outline of the game were neatly organized. It also conveys what the planner wants to do and what kind of game he wants to make. That point can be helpful. However, it took almost ten years from the proposal to the game development as a mobile application version. It took eight more years for the Vita version, scheduled to be released next February. So considering the previous words, "the aim of a proposal is to get development cost,” it is not good at all. It was a time when many users enjoyed RPGs telling the tale until the hero defeats the Demon King. In such a time, trying to propose enjoying the time “after the hero defeated the Demon King,” it seems quite natural that I couldn’t get the budget.
Well, now for the fourth important point that I didn't say at the beginning: Even for a well-known creator with plenty of experience, the chance of getting a project accepted is about the same as a batting average in baseball. The odds are even lower for an in-house planner. Still, proposals are just paper. If you use PowerPoint it does not even cost the paper. Once you get used to it, it takes only three hours to write. Write a proposal as soon as you come up with an idea. Write it on the train, while eating, or on the toilet. Even if it is torn up, don’t give up and write it. That is the best technique for planning.