[choward93]

Well put. While people say dont worry about the business plan, just get your product launched, they really need to look at the overall idea of how the big the market is. Know exactly who you are targeting and how big that target is. Personally, i find the best way to do this is to write a detailed plan out for your teams own benefit. Its worth the time to write your plan out now and make changes before you spend hours on end coding the product, only to change course. But thats the business students perspective for you...

[NSX2]

Not to mention that even an informal business plan forces you to do away with your own fluff and focus on stone-cold reality that will not go away until you address the questions it poses.

[motoko]

Lol, have you ever _read_ a submitted business plan? In my experience, most business plans are exactly the opposite: focus on fluff.

[NSX2]

Uh ... not sure what business plans your talking about, but I would take the worst business plan any VC gets and wager that more people would pay money for whatever it describes, however poorly, then stuff that most programmers put up on the web with a "me and all my programmer friends think it's cool, so give me your money, how about it?" approach ...

[pg]

When Greg Mcadoo of Sequoia spoke at YC last week he said that Sequoia looked for startups founded by people solving problems they themselves faced.

[NSX2]

Good for him.

I'm sure he, like all VCs everywhere, says exactly what he means and would never tell an audience of prospective entrepreneurs what they want to hear just so he doesn't narrow his own investment options in the future.

Not sure what a speach on venture capital funding has to do with creating a successful business based on convincing customers to hand you their money, but I digress ...

Let's say a "business" is defined as "getting a venture capitalist to write you a check."

Try to get him to follow through with cold, hard cash for for, say, a problem you face that nobody else cares about, let alone cares enough to pay for.

For example, go call him up and tell him, "I have this problem: there's this annoying poster on Hacker News called "NSX2" and rather than manually respond to posts he puts up that I disagree with, or, for that matter, rather than respond to any such posters, in a flash of inspiration I created this superb program that summarizes all the key points of my essays into a set of 79, prioritizes their uses as responses, and anticipates what annoying posters are most likely to say based on empirical data I've collected since starting Hacker News and matches their anticipated annoying posts with a point in one of my essays that has the most statistical probability to express what I disagree with and how. Fund me."

Please let me know how that works out for you.

[mixmax]

"Not sure what a speach on venture capital funding has to do with creating a successful business based on convincing customers to hand you their money, but I digress ..."

VC's are an integral part of the setup for many startups that go on to become successful businesses. The list includes Google, Cisco, Ebay, and almost all other big tech companies.

[paul]

That would be a pretty cool product if it actually worked -- it could be used to automate a lot of customer support. I'd invest.