Damn. I was going to offer to do it for $25 but "The wage is not negociable."
TicketStumbler is my third business and I've never used a business plan unless you count the YC application. I certainly understand their purpose for very large projects but for the vast most startups...meh.
It's been on the to-do for ages. I think it's a good idea, but I think having someone else do it for you completely defeats the purpose. Points in favor of a business plan:
- Makes you block out how much stuff will cost. How much will your offices cost when you have 10 people? What about their salaries, insurance, etc.?
- Vaguely, what does profitability look like for you? When do you want to try to reach it?
- Who are you competing with? How are you different?
- How do you want to balance revenue and growth? Do you want to be profitable as soon as possible, or throw as much money as it takes, as often as it takes at growth?
- What sort of company do you want to be?
- In an ideal world, where are you at in three years? Don't worry about this changing, just set something down and use it as a benchmark.
Those seem to be the good reasons to do a business plan -- it makes you ask, and seriously consider some relevant questions. Blathering on about your paradigm shifts is wankery. What are you going to build? Who are you going to need? How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? And how will you make money?
The reason that ours isn't finished isn't because we don't think it's important; it's that we know to reasonably answer the questions above we need to do more research.
People can make a fetish of this but a wiki page that gets updated as you change plans at least lets the team memorialize what you had planned and what happened (memories are slippery things and writing down a plan and some expected outcomes triggers a lot more learning).
1. What’s our runway?
2. What experiments are we running to extend our runway? (e.g. chasing revenue, raising capital, taking debt, writing
grant proposals, cutting burn, grabbing market share in the hopes that it will help us raise capital later, et cetera)
3. How long will we try the experiments before we switch to plan B?
4. What’s plan B?
This looks like a perfect thread to ask a real question that's been on my mind:
How do you write a business plan? More specifically, what are the conventions (format, language to use, etc) for writing one which will be shown to potential investors?
TicketStumbler is my third business and I've never used a business plan unless you count the YC application. I certainly understand their purpose for very large projects but for the vast most startups...meh.
What does everyone else think?