Monthly Archive

I was recently interviewed by Sean Wise for an article for the Toronto Globe and Mail about whether or not entrepreneurs still need to write business plans.   His conclusion is yes - and he makes some good points - that while the business plan should be considered fungible, the process of writing a plan is what creates value, because

• The process creates a common starting point for the entire team
• The process sets the goals and vision for the team
• The process sets the path and identifies required resources
• Writing the plan forces analysis
• The process can help the team feel more confident about their ideas and strategy

From my perspective, even though the business you’re pursuing is almost always likely to change and morph into something unanticipated (and in fact, many of the most successful businesses end up nothing like what they started as,) the process of writing a business plan creates a lot of value.  I’ve written a couple of business plans for startups that went on to receive venture funding, generate revenue, and have a public offering/be acquired.  Writing the business plan was an extremely grueling process that forced me to think clearly about how all the dots of the business connect, and illuminated some of my assumptions that simply did not hold up under scrutiny. 

 Yes, it’s particularly true that in this day and age, with the greatly reduced costs of launching and iterating a Web-based consumer business, that writing a business plan may seem old-fashioned.  “Why bother, when I can just get a product out there and iterate constantly until I hit upon something that works?”  It’s a fair point, but I think the primary benefit that results from writing a business plan isn’t that you get a document in hand that charts the future course of your business - but rather the primary benefit comes from the discipline that the process imparts onto you and the team building that happens along the way. 

Sean’s specific question to me was, “But I heard investors don’t read plans, so what is the point?”

Sean writes, “While it is true that some investors, might not spend as much time reading full plans as you would like them to, all investors do read the executive summary, which is of course based on the financial and entire business plan.”

My comment was -”VCs absolutely pay attention to the executive summary…Writing a full business plan helps you conceptualize all of the nuances of your business and this understanding is crucial in helping you succinctly articulate your startup’s unfair advantage.”

But ultimately, the purpose of writing a business plan is not to please some VCs, but to really build a deep understanding of your business and build team consensus around what the vision is.  I’d like to hear your thoughts about how this may or may not have worked for you. 

After a brief hiatus from blogging, I’m back.  Sometimes I do this because I become oversaturated with information and it’s good to take a step back and spend time just listening, observing, and rearchitecting hypotheses. 

The folks at GigaGamez recently interviewed me for an article about Nintendo and the future of the Wii that they called, “Nintendo’s back…but can they hang on?”

I’m far more bullish about Nintendo’s future prospects than this GigaGamez article is, as my previous blog post indicates.  Jason McMaster makes some good points about Nintendo’s rather shaky past when it comes to television-centric consoles considering the long lull between the ancient success of the SNES and the recent release of the Wii. However, despite the fact that the Wii does hook up to a television and contains hardware innards that are very similiar to the Gamecube, I believe it is more the spiritual kin of the (wildly successful) Nintendo DS rather than the N64 and Gamecube.

I believe Nintendo’s prospects for the success of the Wii should be based on how they handled the DS. The way the DS game market unfolded also shows a pretty decent roadmap of how Nintendo and its third parties could succeed on the Wii platform. Like the DS, the Wii offers a new way to play games and interact with others. Nintendo translated this aspect of the DS into great success with Brain Age and other games that made novel use of the new input system to pull in the non-hardcore audience.   They seem to be doing the same with Wii Sports now, though it will take a little bit of time and a more even parity between supply and demand of the console to see if that holds up. I think it will.

The most important lesson of the DS, as it relates to Jason’s article, is that while the unique selling point of the unit is that it offers the novelty of a touch-screen interface, not every game has to use that novelty to its full capacity. Many of the greatest and best-selling games of the DS’s second and third wave of titles — games like New Super Mario Brothers, Mario Kart DS, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow & Portait of Ruin and Tetris DS don’t use the touchscreen for much more than a couple of token user interface reasons. And that is just fine, as long as there is also a smaller but consistent stream of games that DO use the new interface, like Brain Age, Kirby: Canvas Curse and Elite Beat Agents.

The same should hold true for the Wii. Not every Wii game needs to make the Wii remote the central aspect of the game experience. Between what is sure to be a large install base for the Wii (the system is still impossible to find at retail in many areas) and the fact that developing competitive titles for it will be far less expensive than developing AAA titles for the other “next-gen” consoles, I’m absolutely positive third party developer support will be as strong as Nintendo allows it to be. Hopefully everyone involved realizes, as they eventually did with the DS, that not every game has to be centered completely around the system’s novel interface.