No, it's not the other way about, even though it seem counter-intuitive. Ideally, you should write down your business plan early enough in the game just so you can makes sure that you've answered all the obvious questions and you know there's a business there. You think of your idea, you start to build it (whether it's a product or service) and somewhere along the way, you have to write down what your idea is all about, either to get funding or to market to customers. But apart from the plan, there's the description, often the elevator pitch or one-liner or even the tag line, that you start working on the moment you're ready to talk to other people about your idea and you'll soon find out that these words are more than just 'marketing', they're critical to your business.
First, the very act of trying to describe what your business is about turns out to be a most challenging exercise. It could take you weeks of creating, analyzing and re-creating to come up with something that you believe represents what you are doing. And doing it in clear language takes a little bit more (help from more 'literary' types). Finally it's done and you're excited as you can now build 'a widget that keeps people from losing their marbles'. (Maybe the figurative kind? That would be something.)
So what you have is a nifty way to track marbles, and you think you have a great way to distribute to a large market and make money so you're marching along. And one day, you are putting together a brief summary to send to a business acquaintance who knows someone who is involved in a fund where a partner is super interested in marbles (this is how it often goes). You read your description again and decide that all this time you've been working on the tracking but haven't paid attention to how people would use it. So now you decide you need to focus on the user experience of using the tracking to find the said marbles. Still, it's early enough in the game and it's all good.
And you keep going, and you're reviewing your presentation that you'd be making to a VC soon and the word 'people' hits you. Do you really want to say 'people' which may mean individuals, consumers, or are you really focusing on selling to organizations which may then help people with their marbles? This warrants a sit-down with your team and discussions on which would be the better market, and you decide to focus on individual consumers, especially since your sales and marketing guy assures you that there's not much profit in selling to middle-men. By this time you feel that your team knows exactly what to do and you've laid it all out, and you can confidently answer when the VC asks you 'which people?' or anything else about your product.
You are getting deeper into your business and now you find that there are others out there who are also positioning themselves as having marble trackers like yours and, crushingly, it's not just a startup or two, but a big gun (or two) with the means to take you out before you get established. Since you're a true entrepreneur, you don't just throw up your hands in despair, but you go back to the fundamentals and look at what you set out to do: provide a widget that keeps people from losing their marbles. And the bells clang in your head - your differentiator is in 'keep from losing' - you're not just going to track marbles and help find them once lost, you are going to keep people from losing them in the first place. Maybe that would take not only a widget, but a service, but your team thinks that's great because the big guns aren't going to bother with that and would leave the field to you and the other smaller fry. And as an added bonus, you now have a new exit strategy as maybe one of those abundantly sized guns could buy you out in the future.
Articulating your business and vision in clear terms is critical, not only for selling it to others, but to keep you and your team on track by providing a solid touchstone for every strategic decision you have to make. Not to mention, it may keep you from losing your marbles!
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