I always love listening to stories of successful companies that started up without a business plan. Maybe it’s because the mantra for the last 10 or 15 years has been you have to have a business plan. So people grind away and produces massive tomes that are pretty much out of date by the time they are finished. I agree with Eisenhower, who said “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” The end product is not necessarily as valuable as the process. But, I digress . . .
What I wanted to mention was that BRW magazine currently has a nice video on their front page with some excerpts of speakers from their BRW Fast 100 breakfast. The first speaker is one of the founders of Atlassian, a company that produces support desk software and related developer tools. And, of course, like Intel, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Microsoft, and a bunch of other companies – Atlassian started without a business plan.
And like most companies that started without a business plan, they were bootstrappers. They didn’t spend years on R&D to produce an expensive product and market it with sophisticated razzmatazz. They produced a cheap product that they needed that they could also get to market quickly and sell, and get customer feedback on. Then when prospective customers came back and said “that’s great, but could we just have . . . ” they built the new features in. And, before long, they found someone had placed an order via credit card on the features they had advertised – and they knew that they had a business on their hands.
I’d link to the video, but apparently BRW have deliberately designed their site so people can’t link to specific content. Which in itself is an intriguing internet marketing strategy.