JFDI Britain: You don't need a business plan to #startupbritain
jfdibritain.com
jfdibritain.com
It's 80% bollocks, if you'll pardon my french. What you need to do is ship, measure and respond. The numbers in a business plan never reflect reality and there's too many things that you wouldn't see coming that'll affect you.
Where business plans come in useful is in getting your idea down and making sure you've done everything to confirm that it's a viable startup. Once you're up and running you should be reviewing what you're doing on a regular basis - you don't need a business plan for that.
Coding should be done quite late, after validating the market need, that people are willing to pay, etc.
Unless your time is worthless, of course.
Because you were lucky in this instance does not make that good advice for others to follow. (I'm not saying it's bad advice either, just...)
But given that, I stand by the above. You are better off having a product you can iterate on based on real world feedback, rather than a theoretical construct that hasn't been tested.
FTFY. Research first, and make damn sure there's a viable market there before you sink time into the idea. This is essentially what a business plan is, a documented view of the market and how you're going to make money from it. Without it you're not really building a business…you're building an app.
I'd disagree on a number of points. A business plan is something that gives you an idea of where you've been, where you're headed and what the strategic objectives over the next period (normally a year) are going to be, who's responsible and how that will be executed. For a first year, it's largely a case of documenting what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, feeding in from market analysis and all the other researchy stuff before you start.
The research is a fundamental part of shipping - you can split it out if you want, I don't, mainly for two reasons:
1. You don't actually have a startup until you ship.
2. See 1.
Likewise, writing a business plan without a business isn't quite a fools errand, but isn't the best use of your time because at that point in time you do not have a business, and the minute you do everything will change.
It's great to do the research, in most cases it's essential, the things you're describing (view of the market and how you'll make money out of it) are things that feed into the plan and are actually more important than the plan, not the plan itself.
My 2-10 hour and often single page 'business plans' involve diving head-first into the market and finding out who I'm going to sell to, how many there are of them, what competitors I have, what the ad rates are, etc. With this basic info I can take a grounded and unbiased look into the validity of the concept. You can have the best idea in the world, but if there isn't a market for it, there's not much point in pursuing it if your goals are financially driven. "Build it and they will come" and "Build something you'd want yourself" both aren't good enough reasons alone to sink any amount of time into an idea.
What you need to do is Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
Why not create other kinds of businesses through this approach?
In retail, you can hire a concession, work out a deal to temporarily use someone else's space, or get a market stall. Anything to prove you can sell whatever it is you want to sell before committing to premises, branding, and the like.
There are cheap, scrappy ways to prove the market in most areas without significant capital outlay, unless you're into pharmaceuticals, energy, or similar areas with sky-high infrastructure or standards costs.
I'm a firm believer that a business plan changes as soon as you get any money (and the earlier stage the business is, the more guesswork and unrelated to reality the business plan is). However by doing a business plan, it shows you've thought about how the business is going to work.
Building a business around technology and going "we'll build it and they will come" is in the most part, complete b*llocks. You need to show that you've at least thought about how revenues will be generated, if you haven't why are you running a business. Unless you're a charity (or a not for profit) your only reason for running a business is to generate shareholder value. That may sound corny, but that's why companies have shareholders!!!
So JFDI is fine, but prove it's fine and that it's not just tech for the sake of it.
JFDI Britain is about taking the first steps. It's not focused on technology businesses. It's not about "build it and they will come". It's about getting on with creating something of value, making sure it is of value and making money from it. Once you have done that and can repeat it you have a business and you can chose to grow it however you like.
There are very few businesses that need a significant amount of cash to start but many that need it to grow.
JFDI is the proof.
Let's say [as a concrete example] you're going to open a hairdresser. You need to sit down and work out your fixed start up costs (shopfitting, deposits, licenses), your monthly outgoings (electricity, rent), and what you can expect in income. You need to know the location, the foot-fall, the number of employees, and add in contingencies.
All of that is going to take you a day or so to work out.
This is not a "Business Plan"(TM) with exponentially increasing graphs and 5 year projections, but it's a sound concrete Plan for a Business which lets you know if it's worthwhile starting off.
This is not a high tech Hacker News example, but much of the same fundamentals apply for any business or project.
However, with your hairdresser example you can get started and JFDI by working freelance at another salon or doing home visits.
I doubt it. Calling a hairdresser a Startup, is about as convincing as saying Detroit innovates in transport with efficient engine technology.
The key difference, despite its past, Detroit can create new innovative hi-tech products if requried. [0] I dare say it would be harder for hairdressers around the world to do so in a business that is not technology based.
[0] Sebastian Blanco, "Detroit 2011: Li-Ion motors says hello to first Wave sales, promises Inizio by mid-summer" http://green.autoblog.com/2011/01/11/li-ion-motors-wave-sale...
It's interesting that Startup Britain had real entrepreneurs help. I'm interested to know how much though, did they actually propose the plan of what is being done or just had their names associated with it?
I guess i'm a little biased as I've ran startups and obtained the information they try to put across from better sources and what they offer for saving money means nothing for a tech startup perhaps others might find it useful. But things like Appsumo's recent lean startup bundle really showed how to save money or things like Amazon's free tier EC2 hosting.
The only thing that looks interesting to me would perhaps be the mentoring marketplace and the pledge matchmaker if they can make it work. Some of the other new features are already being done, why create yet another place to do this. 'best of web' just to go to delicious and search for the tag startups 'A calendar of enterprise related events' ha, upcoming? meetup? Lanyrd?
edit> and indeed what does it need access to my account for?