I love social software and interesting data.
I'm 27. I love cooking and trying new food.
I live in Brooklyn, NY Bayonne, NJ.
Contact me at david.lifson@gmail.com.
I'm the co-founder of Postling, a unified dashboard for small businesses.
It's important to me to give back to the startup community, so if you are interesting in hearing my thoughts about your startup, sign up for my office hours or send me an email.
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Short answer: absofuckinglutely. I have seen really great product people espouse the death of the business plan. Do so at your peril.
So, definition: when I talk about a business plan I’m not talking about a 40-page Word document outlining your market approach. That died with waterfall software development. I’m not even talking about your 12-page Powerpoint presentation that you need to raise venture capital or to talk with potential biz dev partners.
I’m talking about your financial spreadsheet. I will quote a prominent, well-known entrepreneur whom I like and respect and who told me when he was raising money, “I don’t know how much I’m going to charge for my product so why should I create an artificial spreadsheet?”
Here’s why. Your financial model tells a story. Let’s take your revenue line. It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you’ll charge for your product. If you can’t estimate the former then I would suggest you haven’t done your homework before building the product. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small?
