Before You Write A Business Plan
UpandRunning.Entrepreneur.com:
Validating the idea and understanding the business model are pretty important steps that should come before writing a business plan. That’s hardly a novel idea.
Still, novel idea or not, successful entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa spells out the early stages very well in a BusinessWeek special report published yesterday, “Before You Write a Business Plan.”
He starts with a short list for validating the idea:
- 1. Write down your thoughts on the product you want to build and the needs you want to solve. You’ll be detailing your hypotheses.
- 2. Validate these hypotheses with as many potential customers as you can. Ask them if they will buy your product or service if you build it. Learn about what features they need and what they will pay for, ask them for more ideas, and be sure that there is a large enough market.
- 3. Build a prototype of your product or offer a test run of your service and again ask potential customers what they think about it. You’ll find that customers usually provide much better input when they can actually try out a product.
Photo by alesia17.
Thomas Drapier on January 15th, 2008 10:56 am
A good reference on what to do before spending the time and energy writing a business plan is:
“The new business road test” by John W. Mullins.
It basically takes you through 7 steps, defining the industry and the market at micro and macro levels, then looks at your and at your team’s abilities to run that particular business.
A must to assess a business opportunity, which is also very helpful when it comes to write a business plan.
mayra on January 15th, 2008 1:30 pm
I need info
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