In trying to start my own business, I’ll be chronicling everything I do so that maybe a succinct formula can emerge to help me and others in the future.
The first and most important step, to me, is to get down on paper what defines this business idea I have. I need to force myself to look at this idea from every angle to determine if it will work and how.
I’ve read a lot online recently about how “business plans are dead; long live the business plan.” What they mean is that for today’s scrappy startup founders, don’t worry about getting mired down in the tedium that comprises the standard 20-30-40-50+ page business plan that includes such detail as sales projections – but you do need something on paper to guide all your efforts and to state exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.
So I set out to find a guide that would tell me how to write up one of these brief-form business plans to get me started, and I discovered LeanStack.com. I signed up for the free trial and found it was a simple but perfect tool for this exact thing. It lets you fill it out and then download it as a PDF.
Maybe at a later step I’ll see fit to get into the long-form stuff, like sales projections.