What’s a business plan? From “This Web Business”:

A business plan is a document prepared by a company that outlines what kind of business the company is in, their history, their competition, their projections, their plans, and their current position.

Writing a business plan is not easy. Or necessary. But I chose to write one (for the first time in my life), based on the fact that when writing something you are forced to think about it. It took me almost 15 days (for 10 or so pages!), but I don’t regret it one bit. Here’s why:

It forced me to analyse many aspects of this whole deal, even on the technical side of things, where I believed no problems would arise. Since I didn’t intend to present my business plan to any bank, VC or investor I laxed the rules of what constitutes a business plan. I thought about, researched and wrote about many things:

• The general outline of what my company will offer (Software products. No services, unless related with these products)
• Company’s mission: a really short blah blah paragraph, aiming to make me feel confident and ready
• Strengths: being small
• Weaknesses: being small again, plus tons of other things ;-)
• A comprehensive research of existing solutions in the CRM market. Commercial systems (in all flavours: windows vs. online, downloadable vs. hosted, enterprise vs. light) and Open Source solutions.
• Proposed solution describing the core functionality plus advanced / innovative features.
• Technology overview (PHP, Apache, IIS, Unix/Linux, Windows)
• Support options: What do I want to offer my clients? What can I offer them? Will it cost?
• Pricing (not that I decided - that’s a tough one)
• Marketing & advertising: What are the most important CRM centered sites? How do I spread the word? What is Google AdWords and how much does it cost? Will I need a sales force?

As you can see, I probably got a little carried away when writing it. It includes many things that usually don’t belong to a business plan, but that’s fine with me. The important thing is, I thought about all these things and decided to continue with my plans.