Showing posts with label business plan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business plan. Show all posts

Founders Lessons Learned - Part 3: Business plan

  1. A business plan is nothing more than your own communication to a person not sitting in front of you—an imaginary person who will read it. Try to answer every possible question that that person could raise.
  2. Writing a business plan is a MUST, it will crystallize your thoughts to communicate your ideas with somebody else.
  3. Business plan is all about showing your momentum.
  4. Having a business plan for big scope, having complete vision distributed on several phases shows your strong vision for the idea and its growth.
  5. Business plan should tell:
    1. What the company is going to do?
    2. What problem it is going to solve?
    3. How big the market is?
    4. What the sources of revenue for the company are?
    5. What your exit strategy is for your investors?
    6. What amount of money is required?
    7. How you are going to market it?
    8. What kind of people you need?
    9. What the technology risks, marketing risks, execution risks?
  6. Funding in business plan, it is always better to prepare the figures before you present your idea, and you should be having multiple numbers in mind, i.e.:

    1. Required x, for completing the whole idea.
    2. Required y, for handling … number of customers.
    3. Required z, for making a POC to show your idea can actually work to VC.
    4. Required w, for covering specific region.

Founders Lessons Learned - Intro

Learning from others is the best in order not to re-invent the wheel and fall in the same mistakes others already did. For founders, it is a MUST as lots can't afford bad start.

I have collected some lessons learned from my readings, & experience. I summarized them in bullet points in the following blog posts:

The following are the references for such tips:
  1. Book: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. ISBN-10: 1590597141 | ISBN-13: 978-1590597149
  2. Magazine article: Arrajol Magazine interview with Greg Booth, Zippo President and CEO.

I will keep this post and related posts updated whenever I read more books or learn new experience hopping this will help some founders / start-ups. Also, I'm open for input from readers as comments and I will update the posts as well.