Business Plan Templates/Advice

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52090

by walesmd • 19 years ago

2 1 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have been working on a website that I believe has a very strong potential to take off and be very successful.

I feel it is time to write a business plan, whether I choose to search for VC funding or continue to seed this venture.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely 0-experience in writing a document of this nature. Are there any templates, guides, or how-to sites available that can assist me in getting a basic business plan completed?

What advice do you have for a venture that could virtually 100% seed funded? I have the programming and design aspects taken care of, it's the hardware and scalability, if this does gain popularity upon launch, that I am worried about (I simply don't have the funds to cover anything beyond shared hosting).

rms• 19 years ago

David Rusenko said in a blog post that if you're scaling too fast to afford your hosting fees, ping him, and he'll hook you up (with investors).

In other words, don't worry about paying the bandwidth bill. Just turn the site on and see what happens. Shared hosting can also get you surprisingly far, MediaTemple offers 1 TB of transfer for $17/month. They kind of suck other than the massive amount of bandwidth offered. And it'll be much more expensive if you need a VPS for lower level functions.

Before you write the business plan, I'd fill out a Y Combinator application, whether you plan on applying or not. It asks really good questions, some of which you may have not already asked yourself. From there, if you want to write a business plan, go for it.

A business plan take whatever format you want to. There are certain things that will always need to be there, but the order varies a whole lot. You can find a bunch of different templates if you just google for business plan template, pick one you like. Don't write the whole thing at once, start with a two page executive summary and then slowly expand it.

Also, I have some decent business plan resources, including PaloAlto's business plan software and some .pdfs. Email me and I'd be happy to share.