I’m almost certain this wouldn’t make a workable business, but I’ve been thinking for a while now that I should put a ‘business plan generator’ on my list of projects. It really pisses me off when I have a cool idea (typically in the shower) that I can’t wait to put on paper before I start doubting its feasibility.
A quick search for ‘business plan generator’ yields the very amusing Web 2.0 business plan generator. Not exactly what I was looking for. There are a couple of good links (1, 2. A search for ‘online business plan’ seems to bring back better results.
And then…hallelujah! WSJ to the rescue — or PaloAlto Software to be more exact. It looks like almost exactly what I was looking for: a simple set of input fields that I can fill as and when I have stuff to put in them, the point being to assemble your content over time and rely on the tool to give it the shape that your investors expect to see (ie, executive summary, market analysis, blah blah).
The three immediately obvious drawbacks are:
- There’s no formatting whatsoever. You literally get a page with your plan’s name on the top and subsections divided by horizontal rules. Text is 10pt Arial throughout.
- There’s no information on privacy. I’d like to trust the WSJ, but without an explicit statement to the effect that “we will encrypt your business plan before sticking it in our database”, I’d be concerned. Firstly, I don’t know their DBAs personally, and that makes me, the soon-to-be-rich entrepreneur, worry. Not only about the DBAs ripping off my idea, but also about my data being (in)advertently sent to the WSJ’s ‘associates’ when they share my membership info. Bummer.
- No tools for peer review/collaboration.
Clearly, PaloAlto’s just trying to establish a toehold so they can (eventually) entice you to buy their $99.95 Pro edition, but you have to wonder if they’re missing out on a potentially lucrative market here by offering no in-between. It’s been done before (see Salesforce.com and Siebel), and the Long Tail effect is now fairly well-established.
I should write a business plan for this…
Update: I took advantage of my ridiculous layover at Abu Dhabi’s toilet-inspired airport to do a quick mock-up of what I’d like in Microsoft’s awesome InfoPath XML form tool (attached below). There’s no revisioning support and you can’t have page breaks, but other than that it does what I wanted — simple data entry with most sections optional, and quick conversion into a presentable form.
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