PlanHQ.com – A Major Breakthrough
“Battle is a highly fluid situation.
You plan on your contingencies, and I have.
You keep your initiatives, and I will.”
Vic Deakins
The reason why I picked this quote is because I applies so well to being in a start-up. It IS a highly fluid situation where nothing goes as planned and all you can do is expect contingencies and keep the initiative. That is also the reason why most business-plans are completely useless. A business-plan is a fixed plan that has to apply to a fluid, constantly changing, situation and it is outdated the moment it is finished.
“No battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy”
Dwight Eisenhower
And the same is true for business-plans.
So until now basically the only reason to write one is to make sure you have thought about as many details as possible and maybe to impress an investor (not that they will actually read it though).
I said ‘until now’ because a few geniuses have come up with a web based businessplan service (Thanks to Erwin Blom for the tip!) called PlanHQ.com that allows you to write and maintain your businessplan online. You can check your targets while you grow. Keep an eye on your competition and use it to generate reports for your shareholders or partners. They transformed the old paper business-plan into a dynamic and interactive service which anybody can use.
And I can’t emphasize enough what a breakthrough this new service is.
If you look at the service it really is just a project management service with some extra bells and whistles. Some of you might even think ‘I can do all that with my current tools’. And that is why it reminds me of the introduction of Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. It became the ‘killer app’ for PCs and people would buy a Macintosh just to be able to use Visicalc. But when the founders Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston) first showed it to people they got the same reactions. At first people just didn’t see how important and revolutionary it was to be able to change numbers on the fly.
Don’t get me wrong; PlanHQ is not VisiCalc and won’t be the killer app for a whole industry. But what is similar is that they took an old economy product which was only available in a static form and made it interactive and fluid.
Amazon did that for books, Skype did it for telephony, Software Arts did it for spreadsheets and eBay did it for auctions. We all hope to do the same for a product one day.
PlanHQ is doing it for businessplans and I applaud them for finding an area that wasn’t digitized yet and has so much to gain from it…
UPDATE: I met with Tim Norton at Techcrunch40 and he is getting serious attention now for PlanHQ which is great!
