Tales From The Startup
by Karri Saarinen on Mar 03, 2010
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The goal of the talk was familiarize some Nordic university students about startup processes, starting things and pointers on how to learn more.
The goal of the talk was familiarize some Nordic university students about startup processes, starting things and pointers on how to learn more.
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Lucas Gasperin Funchal
I agree with Aaron and Tuomas that business plans are not worthless, they have some use, but I believe that you should be skeptical of any advice. If you think that you will get some value out of a business plan, by all means, do one, but don’t do it because someone tells you to or tells you not to. Sometimes you actually even have to do it when applying for some grant or funding. Why I stated that ’You don’t need a business plan’ is because generally academics overvalue planning, and really they teach us to do different kind of business or marketing plans and other documents, not how to make great products or successful businesses. So I wanted to give dosage of skepticism for these students that don’t necessarily have their own experiences with business.
The problem I see with business plans is the standard use and format of them. Usually the plan will have to consist of pages like description of the product, company financing, market summary, indirect effects, competitions, projections and other things. It’s also accustomed that in your plan, you will need to sound convincing and sure about these things even you’re not. You need to guess, make assumptions or even lie to make your plan to sound good. But also you might know that some things that you wrote are actually facts, but now you’re mixing truths with assumptions and lies. When you give this kind of document to someone, you’re not telling the truth. After a while even you might believe that what you wrote is true.
Another thing is that writing a business plan is not necessarily that easy, small or a fun task. For startups that think about doing Minimum Viable Products and other sacrifices or ways to cut the time to the market and be front of the customer, should really think if writing some documents with no apparent customer value is that useful. 3 years ago