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Comment by ColinHayhurst | Hacker News Reader

Well said. Business plans suck time and energy. They are usually required by time wasters (investors you should avoid anyway) and waste valuable time (when you could be iterating).

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Perhaps not a Business Plan, but spending a day planning how you'll do business is a good idea and not one that "sucks time and energy".

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.

I think the problem with business plans is the "plan", as 37signals would say, a business plan is a business guess. What you're talking about is actual hard numbers that are relevant in the immediate future. Business guesses are pointless, mainly because, most of the time, you never ever end up where you "planned" you were going.

To steal Steve Blank's terminology, that's a business model, not a business plan. Every business has a model explicit or not. Not every business needs an explicit plan.

A hairdresser is not a startup, and since it is startupbritain we are talking about your example does not apply.

The trouble with the word startup is that it means different things to different people. Taken literally, it could mean any company which has just started up. That's not what the word usually means when used on HN, of course. I recall this pg essay http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html which notes the difference between being a band that aims to sell a million copies of a song versus a band that is content to play at weddings and bar mitzvahs. A hairdresser is more likely to be the latter than the former. It can still be a startup but it's not a "Startup".

I'd still take the position that a hairdresser could be a Startup (as well as a startup). There are a few well known brands that I expect originated in that fashion(!) and there's always room for further innovation.

"... I'd still take the position that a hairdresser could be a Startup (as well as a startup). ..."

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...

In our local HN echo-chamber terminology maybe not, but it definitely does count as one in the world that the original government backed site is targeting. In that case, "startup" is synonymous with "new business" and I personally don't disagree at all.

Follow the Inspiring Stories under Getting Inspiration - most are not tech-startup focused. Also look at 'About Us' and read the bios. I'd argue that 'startup' for the government relates to any new small business, not just a tech/web focused one.

An established hairdresser may not be a startup, but I see no reason that a new hairdresser can't be called a startup.

Absolutely agree that working out cash flow is critical if you are going to spend significant amounts of cash, otherwise you are in danger of breaking the golden rule.

However, with your hairdresser example you can get started and JFDI by working freelance at another salon or doing home visits.

Totally. No matter how hard the government tries to help (#startupbritain, tech city east or whatever trendy name it is now) it keeps on sounding to me as a political pro on something that has already been happening for time. I mean come on David Cameron's face on the home page, what's that about?

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?

Agreed - check out http://startupbritain-done-better.com/

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