[phekunde]

> None of them are about what you're going to do in the near term future.

Okay, let us look again at some of the questions posted by OP:

1. How do you know people need what you're making?

2. Who might become competitors?

3. How do or will you make money? How much could you make?

These all look future tense to me.

[onion2k]

They're not though. They're all questions about your market. They're asking you to demonstrate domain knowledge.

If you put something forwards-looking like "Google are really big so they might become a competitor!" it wouldn't look great. It's technically true, but it's not interesting. It doesn't demonstrate that you know your market. If you put "Lithuanian Startup X has launched a product in this market 60 days ago, which reached position 3 on Product Hunt, and had a successful Show HN post" then you start to look like you actually follow what's happening. You know your market, and can show you research it. No vague guesses about the future, just demonstrable knowledge about the present.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Traditional business plans are fantasy with numbers.

"By Q4 2025 expected turnover is..."

No one should take that kind of prediction seriously. (Although VCs sometimes do, which is unfortunate.)

Plans exist to show you know what a market is and that you can research the details enough to know who else is in the space, what they've done, how they did it, and what they missed.

If no one else is in the space - still possible, but rare - you should at least be able to point to some comparable efforts, some of which should be your own.

The point is to show that you're capable of thinking strategically and not just nailing some code to the wall and hoping someone will pay to get some use out of it.