Business Plans 2.0: Lean and Icon-based
February 13th, 2010 
Business 
Paul Fayngersh
The attendees of Thursday night’s Bootstrapping and Agility meetup at Rotterdam witnessed the unveiling of a very neat idea that could very well change the game of business plan submissions. Though presented in a “tongue-in-cheek” manner, I believe the concept solves a very real problem: clear communication between entrepreneurs presenting new ventures and investors seeking new opportunities. Many ideas begin from a playful starting point; only when one takes a step back and really evaluates them is their actual merit realized.
The presentation comes from Peter Hilton (@PeterHilton) of Lunatech, part early stage VC firm and part software development company and the gracious hosts of the event. Inspired by the simplicity and success of the Creative Commons icons, which condense pages of information that no one ever reads into an easily-understandable symbol accompanied by a sentence of text, Peter proposes to apply that exact same logic to business plans. In reality many submitted business plans are simply not read by investors – they are too long, too boring, or too convoluted. Naturally, the entrepreneurs who write them want to go into as much detail as possible in their plans while the investors that read them just want to see the very core points.
This inherent rift that persists between investors and entrepreneurs is bridged by creating icon-based business plans, which condense a thick proposal to an easily-digestible single cover page. The system provides a way for entrepreneurs to present exactly what they are offering in a standardized common visual language. It has the potential to save a lot of time (and frustration) for both ends. Of course, this is not meant to replace a business plan, but rather act as an initial filter for at least getting the right ideas through the door.
Lunatech imagines this as a simple web app where users can check-off all the standard descriptions that apply to them, producing a final page of icons that can each be accompanied by no more than an additional 140 characters of descriptive text. This should be enough for any investor to know whether they want to meet with you or not, and to easily identify the strong and weak points of your proposal.
Peter’s entire presentation can be seen here. Please note that this is the first time this has been presented, it is in the very early stages, and they are still very much working on the concept.
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UPDATE (3/5/2010): The application is now live at PlanCruncher.com. Check it out everyone!
Tags: Business, Business Plans, Lean Startup, Lunatech, Startups, Venture Capital
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