Business Plan

Back at the end of August, when Nic and I started Foneshow, I wrote a business plan. It was PDOOMA, and I knew that when I wrote it.

All pre-beta business plans are a shot in the dark. Every VC in the world knows it. Most entrepreneurs know it. The point of writing the early plan is to see if you understand what the factors in your business are. The point is to see if you've got the right fields in your spreadsheet, not to pretend you're entering accurate values in those fields. The point is not to make revenue predictions and do break even analysis.

We didn't know enough then to write a business plan that was an accurate forecast of our business. Our assumptions were wrong. We hadn't talked to enough podcasters. We hadn't written any software yet (other than a quick hack demo). There was no back end at all. We had no idea what the operational requirements of the system were. We didn't know anything about the business realities of telephony or mobile.

Since then we've actually built a product (which is very different than the product we talked about in August). We've been talking to everyone we can to learn about the mobile world. We've talked to podcasters about their needs. We've launched to users, gotten their feedback and integrated the feedback into the product. We've watched how real people use the system.

Now that we have some empirical data it's time to take another crack at the business plan. I'll be immersed in Excel until the New Year.