Avoid the dreaded "pile"

Filed in archive on March 25, 2007

One last post on the topic that began our discussion, the advisability of a traditional business plan, particularly for a bootstrap start-up.

While it still may be argued some sort of planning is a benefit for an entrepreneur or team to keep them on task and on track especially in the early days, David Cowan, venture capital investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, says not even VC's really want to see them.

Instead, Cowan recommends a power point presentation with about 10 slides containing a digest of the kind of information your plan would have provided anyway.

This corresponds with Guy Kawasaki's 10 slides, 20 minutes, thirty-point-font size rule for presentations on your start-up.

Still, for slide number 10, Cowan recommends forecasting performance three years out and for number 8 he'd suggest early distribution and customer numbers.

This to me suggests again that the first step for entrepreneurs with absolutely no performance record is the bootstrap approach, not visiting a venture capitalist.

Once a totally new product has been introduced in a limited way and customers have had some time to interact with it and decide what to do with it, you'll have plenty of time to develop that plan if you really want to and plenty of real numbers to put in it.