you dont know the customer unless you meet the same and you dont really know the customer unless the customer trusts you.

making a plan and winning is like writing a great profile for dating. the pitch is the profile header : yeah if there is a competition for attention, the catchy phrase works – but you know what happens with dating profiles – dont you? — yeah you dont get a date by publishing your profile..

bplan document is just that.. gives a sense of preparedness.. and these venues for competition provide the exposure –

that is all

cheers
olga lednichenko

You are most probably right.

Jacek said: “…bplan competition that can get you anywhere from 5k or 10k for next to no work other than a few hour application and a day or two spent networking…”

A few hours to $5~10k?, hmmm.

Have a look at the other extreme: Participants in Ideas Inc are required to incorporate their business plan into a company (during the competition) and from what we have seen, all 6 finalists (and a few semi-finalists) have spent no less than 90 man days on their startup, check out
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/ideasinc/schedule.html

Do you know of other bplan competitions that are as intensive as the NTU BPC?

Your customers don’t read your plan, and companies that worry about “winning” a plan competition is a clear sign they don’t have a clue what’s important in building a winning company.
1. You won’t win with a few hours or a day or two. And even if you did it’s the wrong focus, and time spent for a startup
2. If winning $5-10K is your goal, you’re not a scalable startup, just a small business. And the rest of the advice on this blog is irrelevant.
3. If you are outside of Silicon Valley or a tech center, networking might be the only valid excuse to spend the time on a competition.

steve

I think the problem here isn’t with Business Plan Competitions, but with the way they are organized.

I agree that as a startup, you need the bplan for collecting your thought, pinpointing weak spots and augmenting it while you’re developing the concept, for helping to pitch your company, get your idea across etc…

But submitting it to a bplan competition that can get you anywhere from 5k or 10k for next to no work other than a few hour application and a day or two spent networking it and presenting it in front of angel cap during the event, is in my eyes well worth it.

And even if you don’t win, participation in the event itself can open up your network and lead to possible future possibilities.

Just my 2¢

Thanks for you note back. I listened to you speak at the Startup2Startup 2 weeks ago. It made me re-think some of the fundamentals of what we were doing and make a few more user/customer meetings on one of our next releases. Funny, but with their feedback, we changed several parts of the product.

On the business plan, we now do just what you had suggested. We did need the full written document for the PPM for our investors, early on. What I am finding challenging is the keeping up with what we are learning, articulating it legibly and keeping the business plan up-to-date. So, as you have said we spend more time diagramming and power-pointing out the b-plan now.

I asked that question because I several months ago I had just spent a week re-writing our plan and some VC blog talked about it being a “luxury.” It made sense, but there does have to be a central road map the allows for evolution.

I need to keep focused on driving the ball down the field. It’s a challenge to keep the play-book up-to-date as we are doing it.

With all that said – startup is the best job in the world!!

Thanks again.

Jon

My two cents is that a business plan is the single place to collect your thinking about about your: business model, distribution channel, demand creation plan, financial assumptions, and customer and product development plan. If you’re text averse like i am, try to diagram these key items and then write-up the diagrams. (Your investors may require something quite different.)
The plan allows you to share your thinking with your team and your investors. And the process of writing it/drawing it, forces you to think it through.

But as I said, the goal isn’t the plan, it’s the business. So the plan should be iterative as you get out of the building.

steve

I spent months and months working on our plan for our startup and as you gain traction and learn it evolves so quickly, it seems impossible to have the same plan from the time you started through the first year.

Rob Adams, the director of MootCorp, is doing an amazing job at providing value to all participants, whether it’s feedback on their business model or making the right introductions. MootCorp in particular has an impressive track record of putting early stage tech companies on the right path towards funding. Take a look at the companies who have raised money (and are still going) after competing: http://www.mootcorp.org/companies.asp

Preparing the pitch for a year is definitely excessive, but I don’t see the harm done in taking a few weeks of doing brutally honest market validation, surveys, financial forecasts etc. as one attempt to clearly define how exactly the company is creating value in the market.