How Necessary is a Business Plan, Really?

[Johnny boy]

I appreciate the thought out plan. Action first, then worry about all the legalities and what not later on. Prove it works before planning it'll work.

I appreciate this immensely so I thank you for your view on how you would go about my situation!

Yes there’s just a fundamental desire/need of “ah F*ck I don’t wanna buy a bunch of protein powders I just want to sample things” and then there’s a million ways for you to skin that cat, so go find out how you’ll do it and how you’ll handle the customer acquisition. Think outside of the box.

Maybe you can afford to run ads but usually that stuff is expensive and the margins wouldn’t support paid ads.

Read some Alex Hormozi 100m books as you figure out your strategy for getting customers.

 

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[Ing]

Everybody starting has a businessplan.
Without a plan nothing works.

But: one has the plan in His head, just going and making sales.

The other makes a plan for the plan‘s sake. Does he start selling?

You allways can decide, what you do.

 

[Andy Black]

You don’t need surveys.

People don’t know themselves enough to answer hypotheticals.

Everyone would say it’s a good idea and then when you ask them to buy, who F*cking knows.

Work out the basics, quickly.

1. What’s it called
2. How’s it going to work? You need single serving containers, some packaging, a box, a way to organize the list of customers, etc

What you do now is set out to prove some things.

I call these things “premises”. In logic, multiple premises together support a conclusion. Your business conclusion you are trying to support is “this is a good idea and is going to succeed”. To do that there’s some things you need to prove in order to support this idea.

1. Find out hypothetical prices for all of your costs. You don’t need to buy 10,000 orders of containers at 0.03 each in order to know that you can. But if you do a little research, find out what potential numbers you can have and use that to calculate your costs.

2. Use that to set your costs. You will need to prove that you can sell it at a cost that makes sense assuming all of the potential costs you’ll ever have even with 20 employees. You need to prove it can sell at a certain price.

3. You need to prove you can get some sales. Your distribution strategy of getting peoples attention is everything. Can you create an Instagram bot that sends a dm to everyone that comments on any posts around gym related content and sends 50 DM’s a day telling people about the problem you solve? Can you partner with local gyms with large customer lists to send out your solution to their customers and use a coupon code to partner with the gyms? Are you willing to scrape a list of 10,000 gyms and call up 100 a day for 100 days? Can you get fitness influencers to partner with you? Have fun sending custom DM’s all day.

This is what I would do

Write out the plan of how it actually works
Make a shitty homemade unprofitable version with some cardboard boxes, ghetto packaging, a small batch of containers, etc. make it as easily as possible from stuff at the local store. Try 30 protein powders and pick your top favorites in every flavor category. Make your shitty box V1.

Make a sales page on a website. Copy other successful box subscription formats because they’ve spent a lot of money on figuring out what works, get the best looking version of it live online as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Grind like a muhfucker calling everyone, sending DM’s, find something that sticks where you can get the most people give a shit per hour of your time spent hustling doing outreach.

Don’t rely on family or friends they are fake customers and don’t help prove your premises.

This can take little money and a few weeks of your time.

Don’t worry about anything else at all. Get the shit penciled out, apply elbow grease, hustle and get some sales that help prove your premises.

Let’s say you called 5 gyms and one of them is interested in partnering and you agree to share a split and they send it to their customers. Now you have an attention distribution channel. Get a few more yes’s and spend time making things better.

Get a better box, packaging, branding, get some nicer stuff and then hit the MF’n phones like a telephone terrorist getting every gym on the line hearing about your stuff. Get 500 partnerships and they all send out their emails and get 60 customers signed up netting you $10/mo profit each.

That’s $600 per gym times 500 gyms = $300,000 per month profit. Numbers may vary. This is just one strategy off the top of my head.

Save the legal, the loans, the taxes, etc. all way later.

Do the above now.

This is how business people start companies.

This is why they say winning comes down to perspiration. You’ll spend a lot of time barking up trees and getting told to kick rocks by most people. Your pitch will be the worst it’s ever going to be. Your product will be the worst it’s ever going to be. Your outreach strategy will be the worst it’s ever going to be. Etc. But you have one asset, you hate being F*cking poor and you have a dream that keeps you up at night. That’s more powerful than anything else.

I can already tell you that your idea will probably work. It obviously solves a problem and it seems like it would work. It fundamentally makes sense.

Now it just comes down to your ability to think outside of the box in how to get it in front of people, and how much hustle you have in your heart. If you have laser focus and don’t give a shit about anything else for years, you will succeed.

I swear this is all you need.

This is brilliant Johhny. Thank you for taking the time to go into detail here.

This is what a plan should look like. Have theories/premises, and set out to prove/disprove them.

Figure out if and how people want samples.

Figure out if and how you can get in front of people willing to pay for samples.

Figure out if and how you can get a steady stream of people signing up.

Etc.

Break it down into provable steps.

 

[Andy Black]

Make of this what you will:

In my early 30s I was buying another rental property.

I looked at asking prices online for two bed starter properties.

I looked at rental prices for similar properties.

I looked at job listings in the local papers and estimated the combined salary of a young local couple in average jobs. I calculated the maximum mortgage they'd get and the maximum they could pay for a starter property (factoring in a deposit they'd save or be gifted by parents).

I worked out the deposit I'd have to pay if I was to buy it to let, what my mortgage payments would be, the taxes I'd have to pay, etc.

I worked out how much the prices could increase beyond what they were currently selling for.

I put it into a spreadsheet and met the old bank manager with my laptop.

I took him through my one page spreadsheet explaining what everything meant and where it came from.

All I remember is him sitting back at the end looking at me with a twinkle in his eyes. I told him "I don't have a business plan." and he just pointed at the laptop saying "That's your business plan."

 

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[rpeck90]

If you're starting out, you need cashflow. Cashflow means hustling. Hustling means making your own money.

Planning / strategy comes after you have a business set up and generating cash. Without that, you're wasting time.

Your real question needs to be how can you make independent money now. Sweeping floors, selling diet pills online, porn affiliate sites... anything that's going to get cash in your bank account without needing a job. Nothing wrong with a job, but it's a different mindset to starting your own thing.

I would spend time examining the best "hustles" you can pursue right now to make money. A good trick to do this, which I learned from Chris Rempel, is to look at where the money is flowing and see if you can get in front of it too - look at popular online marketplaces and see if you can sell the more successful products. Amazon, Clickbank, eBay, Flippa, EmpireFlippers - anywhere where you can see sales data, devour it and use it to inform your own ideas.

Even better, if you get "INSIDERS" knowledge on someone's sales data, use that to create your own offers. You'd be surprised at how much data you can get access to... the reason most don't have access to it is because they never look for it.

At the start, the key factor is speed. You need to churn through projects / ideas / hustles in order to find one you can scale. The opportunity to do that will be unique to you, no guru or random Internet person is going to be able to help you with it - you'll find it when you start getting people asking you for advice/information about something. From there, it's essentially a case of investing into certain assets to differentiate your offering from others in the same industry, which will compound over time into something that makes money without your input. The more of the right assets you create, the bigger the work/project you can eventually take on, which is where the "fastlane" part comes in.

Most important is having the fortitude to commit yourself to a vision and pursue it regardless of setbacks. Funny how they don't teach that at school, despite it being one of the more crucial determinants of success.

-

As an addendum, you'll quickly start to realise that a lot of the "official" stuff that people think you need to do is bullshit.

Many things that you are "encouraged" to do are not going to help you get rich. School, for the most part, is a waste of time. University, unless you want to do something that absolutely requires a qualification, is a waste of time.

Unless you are going for a loan or need investment, you don't need a business plan; you need sales. One of the most apt skills you'll learn through pursuing your own path is to what to ignore. There's a LOT of noise out there that's designed to steal your energy & focus. Poor people give away their time & energy to this noise, watching shit on TV and consuming all sorts of bullshit that does nothing to help them move forward.

A good thing that many people would do to internalise is to understand what "rich" actually means. The best content I've seen on the topic is this: Whiz Kid Technomagic - Riches vs. Wealth

 

[Black_Dragon43]

If you're starting out, you need cashflow. Cashflow means hustling. Hustling means making your own money.

Planning / strategy comes after you have a business set up and generating cash. Without that, you're wasting time.

Your real question needs to be how can you make independent money now. Sweeping floors, selling diet pills online, porn affiliate sites... anything that's going to get cash in your bank account without needing a job. Nothing wrong with a job, but it's a different mindset to starting your own thing.

I would spend time examining the best "hustles" you can pursue right now to make money. A good trick to do this, which I learned from Chris Rempel, is to look at where the money is flowing and see if you can get in front of it too - look at popular online marketplaces and see if you can sell the more successful products. Amazon, Clickbank, eBay, Flippa, EmpireFlippers - anywhere where you can see sales data, devour it and use it to inform your own ideas.

Even better, if you get "INSIDERS" knowledge on someone's sales data, use that to create your own offers. You'd be surprised at how much data you can get access to... the reason most don't have access to it is because they never look for it.

At the start, the key factor is speed. You need to churn through projects / ideas / hustles in order to find one you can scale. The opportunity to do that will be unique to you, no guru or random Internet person is going to be able to help you with it - you'll find it when you start getting people asking you for advice/information about something. From there, it's essentially a case of investing into certain assets to differentiate your offering from others in the same industry, which will compound over time into something that makes money without your input. The more of the right assets you create, the bigger the work/project you can eventually take on, which is where the "fastlane" part comes in.

Most important is having the fortitude to commit yourself to a vision and pursue it regardless of setbacks. Funny how they don't teach that at school, despite it being one of the more crucial determinants of success.

-

As an addendum, you'll quickly start to realise that a lot of the "official" stuff that people think you need to do is bullshit.

Many things that you are "encouraged" to do are not going to help you get rich. School, for the most part, is a waste of time. University, unless you want to do something that absolutely requires a qualification, is a waste of time.

Unless you are going for a loan or need investment, you don't need a business plan; you need sales. One of the most apt skills you'll learn through pursuing your own path is to what to ignore. There's a LOT of noise out there that's designed to steal your energy & focus. Poor people give away their time & energy to this noise, watching shit on TV and consuming all sorts of bullshit that does nothing to help them move forward.

A good thing that many people would do to internalise is to understand what "rich" actually means. The best content I've seen on the topic is this: Whiz Kid Technomagic - Riches vs. Wealth

Everyone should print this out, put it in a gold frame, and mount it on their desk so they constantly see it. Crushed it @rpeck90

That's exactly how I did it every single time, for every single business.

 

[Kevin88660]

A monthly subscription model where per month, customer receives a fitness supplement box containing protein powder samples, protein drinks, protein snacks, then later down the line I plan to expand into other workout supplements like preworkouts, bcaa's, and creatine. The catch is that I am not formulating any supplement myself. My goal was to achieve a wholesale price with all these different protein powder brands and "resell" their sample packs.

A big issue is that people don't want to spend money on a protein powder tub that costs $44.99 just to not like the flavor after one serving now they feel like they either wasted the money or have to justify the taste by saying they already paid for it. So this monthly box can help people realize what types of flavors they like and don't like before buying in bulk, and also let people try such different flavors because there's thousands of brands with each their own line of flavors and products. All I've done is lots of market research on protein supplementation. Today I am planning to get confirmation on the idea with surveys and what not to see if people would actually take part in this subscription model if it was available

I didn’t get the part on paying for sampling, maybe because I don’t take protein supplement.

Why could customers pay monthly for sampling? Is there a need to sample every month?

Also you have to think and categorize what business you are into. Are you a protein powder middle man and a supplement expert? Or you are just doing a sampling service for customer to try something before they get into big purchases

Also are you going to mail the sample out? What is the mailing cost? My first gut instinct reaction is that if mailing cost is high that makes the sampling uneconomical for low ticket item product. I would be doing a sampling service for alcohols. There are wine collectors and drinkers who spend a lot on quality wine.

 

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[Black_Dragon43]

I don't see a "need" for what you described above as a consumer who already has a fitting product.

Well well… of course you don’t! Making you see the need is the job of sales and marketing.

This is precisely why we don’t go around asking you (or anyone else) what you need. Because usually you have no clue. It’s only till after you see that thing that you realize you need it.

By default any pressing need would have you searching for a solution, which, being the creative genius that you are, I’m sure you’d find sooner rather than later. And if you’re not searching, then it’s not a pressing need, it’s more of a BS fake need.

That only leaves one gate of opportunity open for me, the guy who wants to take your money. Illuminating a problem for you that you weren’t previously aware of before.

That’s what I do for my clients and how I get clients as well. You need to generate demand, not tap into existing demand. Existing demand is fulfiled already, most often, with rare exceptions.

 

[Texxip]

You don’t need surveys.

People don’t know themselves enough to answer hypotheticals.

Everyone would say it’s a good idea and then when you ask them to buy, who F*cking knows.

Work out the basics, quickly.

1. What’s it called
2. How’s it going to work? You need single serving containers, some packaging, a box, a way to organize the list of customers, etc

What you do now is set out to prove some things.

I call these things “premises”. In logic, multiple premises together support a conclusion. Your business conclusion you are trying to support is “this is a good idea and is going to succeed”. To do that there’s some things you need to prove in order to support this idea.

1. Find out hypothetical prices for all of your costs. You don’t need to buy 10,000 orders of containers at 0.03 each in order to know that you can. But if you do a little research, find out what potential numbers you can have and use that to calculate your costs.

2. Use that to set your costs. You will need to prove that you can sell it at a cost that makes sense assuming all of the potential costs you’ll ever have even with 20 employees. You need to prove it can sell at a certain price.

3. You need to prove you can get some sales. Your distribution strategy of getting peoples attention is everything. Can you create an Instagram bot that sends a dm to everyone that comments on any posts around gym related content and sends 50 DM’s a day telling people about the problem you solve? Can you partner with local gyms with large customer lists to send out your solution to their customers and use a coupon code to partner with the gyms? Are you willing to scrape a list of 10,000 gyms and call up 100 a day for 100 days? Can you get fitness influencers to partner with you? Have fun sending custom DM’s all day.

This is what I would do

Write out the plan of how it actually works
Make a shitty homemade unprofitable version with some cardboard boxes, ghetto packaging, a small batch of containers, etc. make it as easily as possible from stuff at the local store. Try 30 protein powders and pick your top favorites in every flavor category. Make your shitty box V1.

Make a sales page on a website. Copy other successful box subscription formats because they’ve spent a lot of money on figuring out what works, get the best looking version of it live online as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Grind like a muhfucker calling everyone, sending DM’s, find something that sticks where you can get the most people give a shit per hour of your time spent hustling doing outreach.

Don’t rely on family or friends they are fake customers and don’t help prove your premises.

This can take little money and a few weeks of your time.

Don’t worry about anything else at all. Get the shit penciled out, apply elbow grease, hustle and get some sales that help prove your premises.

Let’s say you called 5 gyms and one of them is interested in partnering and you agree to share a split and they send it to their customers. Now you have an attention distribution channel. Get a few more yes’s and spend time making things better.

Get a better box, packaging, branding, get some nicer stuff and then hit the MF’n phones like a telephone terrorist getting every gym on the line hearing about your stuff. Get 500 partnerships and they all send out their emails and get 60 customers signed up netting you $10/mo profit each.

That’s $600 per gym times 500 gyms = $300,000 per month profit. Numbers may vary. This is just one strategy off the top of my head.

Save the legal, the loans, the taxes, etc. all way later.

Do the above now.

This is how business people start companies.

This is why they say winning comes down to perspiration. You’ll spend a lot of time barking up trees and getting told to kick rocks by most people. Your pitch will be the worst it’s ever going to be. Your product will be the worst it’s ever going to be. Your outreach strategy will be the worst it’s ever going to be. Etc. But you have one asset, you hate being F*cking poor and you have a dream that keeps you up at night. That’s more powerful than anything else.

I can already tell you that your idea will probably work. It obviously solves a problem and it seems like it would work. It fundamentally makes sense.

Now it just comes down to your ability to think outside of the box in how to get it in front of people, and how much hustle you have in your heart. If you have laser focus and don’t give a shit about anything else for years, you will succeed.

I swear this is all you need.

Additional question few days later: I am ready to confirm validation for the product but I am stuck between two sides:

1. Do I make the minimal protype to sell as a product instead of a subscription (at the same price the subscription would be)?

2. Do I try to minimize expenses in the prototype V1 by creating a fake door test to gauge interest in the product that way before putting more time, effort, and money into this endeavor?

 

[Johnny boy]

Additional question few days later: I am ready to confirm validation for the product but I am stuck between two sides:

1. Do I make the minimal protype to sell as a product instead of a subscription (at the same price the subscription would be)?

2. Do I try to minimize expenses in the prototype V1 by creating a fake door test to gauge interest in the product that way before putting more time, effort, and money into this endeavor?

Whatever is fast

 

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[Timmy C]

If you're starting out, you need cashflow. Cashflow means hustling. Hustling means making your own money.

Planning / strategy comes after you have a business set up and generating cash. Without that, you're wasting time.

Your real question needs to be how can you make independent money now. Sweeping floors, selling diet pills online, porn affiliate sites... anything that's going to get cash in your bank account without needing a job. Nothing wrong with a job, but it's a different mindset to starting your own thing.

I would spend time examining the best "hustles" you can pursue right now to make money. A good trick to do this, which I learned from Chris Rempel, is to look at where the money is flowing and see if you can get in front of it too - look at popular online marketplaces and see if you can sell the more successful products. Amazon, Clickbank, eBay, Flippa, EmpireFlippers - anywhere where you can see sales data, devour it and use it to inform your own ideas.

Even better, if you get "INSIDERS" knowledge on someone's sales data, use that to create your own offers. You'd be surprised at how much data you can get access to... the reason most don't have access to it is because they never look for it.

At the start, the key factor is speed. You need to churn through projects / ideas / hustles in order to find one you can scale. The opportunity to do that will be unique to you, no guru or random Internet person is going to be able to help you with it - you'll find it when you start getting people asking you for advice/information about something. From there, it's essentially a case of investing into certain assets to differentiate your offering from others in the same industry, which will compound over time into something that makes money without your input. The more of the right assets you create, the bigger the work/project you can eventually take on, which is where the "fastlane" part comes in.

Most important is having the fortitude to commit yourself to a vision and pursue it regardless of setbacks. Funny how they don't teach that at school, despite it being one of the more crucial determinants of success.

-

As an addendum, you'll quickly start to realise that a lot of the "official" stuff that people think you need to do is bullshit.

Many things that you are "encouraged" to do are not going to help you get rich. School, for the most part, is a waste of time. University, unless you want to do something that absolutely requires a qualification, is a waste of time.

Unless you are going for a loan or need investment, you don't need a business plan; you need sales. One of the most apt skills you'll learn through pursuing your own path is to what to ignore. There's a LOT of noise out there that's designed to steal your energy & focus. Poor people give away their time & energy to this noise, watching shit on TV and consuming all sorts of bullshit that does nothing to help them move forward.

A good thing that many people would do to internalise is to understand what "rich" actually means. The best content I've seen on the topic is this: Whiz Kid Technomagic - Riches vs. Wealth

I wish we could bookmark posts, this is good stuff!

 

[edelstein2020]

if you are a SOLO play, you do not need a paper business plan.
all you need is act
act right now
not tomorrow,
today