Eugene "B"-log: The value of a #startup business plan
Dear Eugene,
you asked for someone else’s opinion about this topic. Here is my comment:
Today’s entrepreneurs are following a mantra of lean startup and assume things will fall into place as you go without truly diving into the methodology. Often they tell me that they have been advised many times to skip the business plan and just sell sell sell.
This is not Lean Startup. Lean Startup never advises to skip the Business Plan. Business Plan is necessary once you have reached the Product-Market Fit in order to acquire resources for scaling. But before that, Lean Startup explains how to gather the necessary information for writing a solid and less-risky Business Plan.
It seems there is a big misunderstanding around. A plan is a course of action that need to be executed in order to achieve a goal. Therefore, it is a different type of plan that is needed for startups in the first stage because the goal is learning as much as possible from the potential customers. Selling an MVP to early adopters is one (probably the most reliable) way to learn if the product is actually fit for the market.
It is only at this stage (when the Product-Market Fit is undoubtedly achieved) that one has to consider a strategy to scale the business. The strategy can be described in a Business Plan and handed out to investors.
In summary, I don’t see Lean Startup negating the value of a Business Plan, but only placing it in the right context, i.e. gathering resources from investors to scale a demonstrably viable business model.
Cheers,
Vincenzo
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leanstart-geneva reblogged this from eugeneb and added:
Dear Eugene, you asked for someone else’s opinion about this topic. Here is my comment:
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eugeneb posted this
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