Start With a Business Model, Not a Business Plan - Steve Blank | Business Improvement and Social media | Scoop.it

   Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from? In the early days of venture capital, investors and entrepreneurs were familiar with the format of business plans from large companies and adopted it for startups. Without much thought it has been used ever since.

   A business plan is the execution document that existing companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. The plan is an operating document describes the execution strategy for addressing these “knowns.”

   A startup is notabout executing a series of knowns. Most startups are facing a series of unknowns – unknown customer segments, unknown customer needs, unknown product feature set, etc.That means that writing a static business plan first adds no value to starting a company, as the plan does not represent the iterative nature of the search for the model.

 


Via Peter Hoeve, David Hain