No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers

steveblank.com

31 points·icey··5 comments

Excellent article, and it gets to a point that has often been debated here: the value of business plans.

I tend to agree with the author: a business plan is worse than useless if your goal is to follow it blindly; the value comes from the process of planning, and any document produced needs to be viewed as provisional and open to revision.

Thank you for making me feel better about my half baked business plan. I as well spent 2 Months writing a 30 page business plan just to throw it in the corner.

Once I realized my assumptions about our target audience were as unproven as the "model consumer" in economic theories, I know that can't be right.

Maybe instead of a business plan, it should be a business journal. Keep a log of what you know, and a long of what you know you don't know.

This is similar to what I am doing right now with Chowculate. I keep a TiddlyWiki which I use to contain 'what I know' about the business plan. This includes what I want to do and have done; I use it as a task management system.

I never considered trying to list what I don't know... Sounds like a useful exercise! Should be very enlightening about pointing me at what I should be trying to learn.

Now if I only I could do something about what I don't know that I don't know.

"Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.”

Here is one of the key elements stated "testing your assumptions". Often all the valuable time spend on business plans has limited value if the assumptions are wrong.

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