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Comment by trizk | Hacker News Reader

A business plan is an exercise to both familiarize yourself with your market and explore your vision. It helps ensure that what you are doing is grounded in reality and provides you with a well thought out initial trajectory. It is not set in stone and is something you use as a loose guide to direct your company. You can and will carefully pivot based on ongoing analysis of the dynamics of the situation in the trenches. Although it is of more benefit to you and your company than to anyone else, it certainly helps show that you are on top of your game.

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To be honest, I am not at the top of my game in that sense and no one should expect me to be at this stage. Enough data doesn't exist to make good guesses now. Generating it is exactly why I am approaching an angel and trying to get to demo and beta.

Then figure out, in terms of expenses and whatnot, what you'll need to get to demo and beta and beyond (should this prove feasible).

From there, it gets trickier, but if you've built a good product that relieves some need without causing too much additional pain, you'll (possibly/probably) be fine.

Shouldn't data exist in the form of direct competitors? If there aren't any, then does this market exist? (It's entirely possible that it does, and no one but you sees it yet).

Data should also exist in the form of knowing roughly how many people could benefit from your product (and who might consider it a step up). If you're basing this on a market need, then that population should be at least a somewhat knowable quantity.

Oh, I was expecting a more general discussion about business plans so I didn't put in too many details. I have talked to quite a few customers during our customer dev and some of them really like the idea. They think this innovation will increase their revenue but no one is sure by how much (and there is of course the risk that we are all wrong about it or the idea needs pivoting before it does that). It also involves a little bit of hardware so I need about the amount of money an average yc company gets from yc to get to the demo from here. I can do some other somewhat related projects to slowly raise that money but that is just wasting time. Ideally I should just get on it and get the demo out and deployed. Once we see what effect if at all it has on our customer's sales and how much it cost us to get that, we can iterate, price, figure out the revenue and generally write a business plan we could honour.

So, basically my angel's roi is not clear and a convertible note with a reasonable discount sounds ideal but the system here is the system and I don't want to waste time fighting it. I will put in a business plan to get talking to the right guys and then try and convince the right angel to ignore it and do a convertible note and hopefully all will be well in the world again. This will have the unfortunate side effect of polluting my mind with fake figures and expectations which I wish I could avoid but that's just part of the game at the moment.

So all you have is an idea in your head and you want people to give you money? Don't expect anything. Put yourself in the angel's shoes. Do you know how many people tell them "Psst! Have I got an idea for you!" on a daily basis? Your chances are very close to nil and you need to produce some value to differentiate yourself.

Either roll up your sleeves and bootstrap the beta or have professional courtesy to sit and honestly write down, in-depth why you think it would be profitable for someone to give you money.

I have an idea, a co-founder, a company bootstrapped and running. I have potential customers who like the idea and are ready for a beta. And I am pursuing the idea whether or not the angel money comes through (just a whole lot more slowly).

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