
No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers - icey
http://steveblank.com/2010/04/08/no-plan-survives-first-contact-with-customers-%e2%80%93-business-plans-versus-business-models/
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michael_dorfman
Excellent article, and it gets to a point that has often been debated here:
the value of business plans.

I tend to agree with the author: a business plan is worse than useless if your
goal is to follow it blindly; the value comes from the process of planning,
and any document produced needs to be viewed as provisional and open to
revision.

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emanuer
Thank you for making me feel better about my half baked business plan. I as
well spent 2 Months writing a 30 page business plan just to throw it in the
corner.

Once I realized my assumptions about our target audience were as unproven as
the "model consumer" in economic theories, I know that can't be right.

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ziadbc
Maybe instead of a business plan, it should be a business journal. Keep a log
of what you know, and a long of what you know you don't know.

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Goosey
This is similar to what I am doing right now with Chowculate. I keep a
TiddlyWiki which I use to contain 'what I know' about the business plan. This
includes what I want to do and have done; I use it as a task management
system.

I never considered trying to list what I don't know... Sounds like a useful
exercise! Should be very enlightening about pointing me at what I should be
trying to learn.

Now if I only I could do something about what I don't know that I don't know.

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eande
"Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside
the building, your business plan is just creative writing.”

Here is one of the key elements stated "testing your assumptions". Often all
the valuable time spend on business plans has limited value if the assumptions
are wrong.

