Marketing BookBot: Developing a Project Charter for a Pre-Seed Startup

It was summer 2025, and Sterling Dixon had just begun working at BookBot, a pre-seed start-up with an AI-powered platform designed to help self-published authors market their books. These authors often cited marketing as the hardest part of the self-publishing process, and BookBot aimed to simplify and scale book promotion with features like social media AI assistance, press outreach, podcast support, and more. Dixon had been tasked with developing a plan to tackle a 10-week project and presenting it to the executive team the next day with very little direction. The case leads students through a discussion that allows them to convert a complex and ambiguous project into a Project Charter and process that enables them to tackle any assignment with success, even when the information about the project is limited or ambiguous.