I should be able to understand your entire business by reading one page: Your executive summary. If I, as an investor, am compelled to read further, then I might read the rest of your plan. Make sure you include a solid monetization plan. Have several methods lined up and get quotes from all the ad networks. For instance, how many users before they will place ads on your site. CPM rates, etc. Explain how you plan to optimize your site and show that in your projections. Make sure you also account for all your possible expenses. Explain how you differentiate and how you plan to gain traction.



Last but not least, investors will want to know their return on investment and how quickly they can expect it. Writing the plan forces you to gain so much more knowledge about your company. Market research is also one the key components. There are no companies that don’t have competition. Hunt down your competitors and explain why you are better. My best advice is to take your time, and never think you are done. Business plans are “ever-evolving” documents. Also, as one of my previous posts implied—Focus is key! The #1 thing that most investors look down on is multiple ideas. Are you all over the map? Figure out which of your revenue streams is strongest, and focus on that. You can throw all of your other ideas into a “Future Products and Services” section. Spending hours explaining each one however, is useless. Lastly, longer is not always better. If you start repeating yourself, whoever is reading it is going to be bored to death. Short, concise, and to the point. Investors look at hundreds of plans a week. They don’t have time to read 100 pages.



My first plan was organized something like this:

1. Executive Summary.
1.1. Objectives
1.2. Mission
1.3. Keys to Success
2. Company Summary
2.1. Company Ownership
2.2. Start-up Summary
3. Services
3.1. Future Products and Services
4. Market Analysis Summary
4.1. Market Segmentation
4.2. Target Market Segment Strategy
4.3. Service Business Analysis
4.3.1. Competition and Buying Patterns
5. Strategy and Implementation Summary
5.1. Competitive Edge
5.2. Marketing Strategy
5.3. Sales Strategy
5.4. Milestones
5.4.1. Expenses
5.4.1.1. Hosting
5.4.1.2. Bandwidth
5.4.1.3. Information Technology
5.4.1.4. General Business
5.4.1.5. Legal
5.4.2. Capital Expenditures
5.4.2.1. Intellectual Property
5.4.2.6. Legal
5.4.2.7. User Interface
5.4.2.8. Server Hardware
5.5. Technical Information
6. Management Summary
6.1. Management Team
7. Financial Plan
7.1. Philosophy



Key things NOT to say:

“I don’t have competition”
“All I need is 1% of the market share and I can be successful.”
“I plan to get acquired, therefore all I need is eyeballs and don’t need to worry about monetization.”

Furthermore, when pitching investors, you need to come prepared. Investors will not sit in the meeting with you and thumb through your plan page for page. Come with a 10-15 page power point presentation. If you can convince the investor that it’s promising, then they will go home and read your plan. They will do their due-diligence and you won’t hear back from them immediately. It’s a long, drawn out process. Pitch multiple investors! The community is tight nit. A VC, if he likes your plan, will share it with all his VC friends to get advice. You need to convince every VC that you are the best. Sometimes VCs will talk trash on you to other VCs to gain leverage. You need to prove yourself to everyone. Get in there and don’t expect term sheets. It’s common to expect one term sheet for every 10 investors that you pitch. The final thing you need to come with is a deal sheet. Personally I presented the deal sheet as a separate presentation after pitching and gauging the prospective investor's interest. This is something that is usually involved in the plan too. Whether it’s a bridge loan investment later, straight cash for equity,

Potential clients come to us every day concerned about planning their software and how to get their vision across. This is our core offering at FaceySpacey--helping actualize your vision in a way that closes the communication gap 100% with the programmers. I'm going to explain some of our methods right here (although this might put us out of job).





I personally use Paint, Powerpoint and Excel. I build the exact piece of software or website in paint and then I put it into Powerpoint and show every single possible interaction as well as any calculations and how the calculations interact with the database. To show interaction with the database, I show screenshots of tables built in excel.

A lot of the other more specialized tools are just fluff. You need to get straight to the point and visualize it as it is and be able to get right into it right away. Copy and paste screenshots or already existent software and web sites/applications and paste them into paint and copy and paste chunks or pieces between paint windows to achieve the UI you want. This is how you should start. MAKE YOUR SITE LOOK EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD IN PAINT! Take the nav-bar from Youtube, take the newsfeed from Facebook, take the "People You May Know" box from the Linked in user homepage, etc. Paste each chunk into one Paint file. Then start renaming things and re-arranging the sub-components of each component you dropped in. If you need drop-down menus and other forms, just google image search "drop-down menus" etc.

Try to use components from sites for which you would like to mimic the design. Eventually, you'll be giving this stuff to a designer. So capture the essence you will be going for later on now. Once you're done with this, You'll have 2 options depending on your time-framed: Put the exact diagrams you made into PowerPoint and do the remaining 75% of the planning work while the designer designs the pages, or have the designer design the pages AND THEN put those into Powerpoint. Do the later if you have time. Do the former if you don't.

Once you're in Powerpoint, you're going to realize that your diagrams will need to be modified to most easily show some interactions--most specifically ajax animations and the like. You will see that your web-page changes (or desktop application) as the user clicks certain things. You're going to have to go back to Paint, make a more default version of this page (stored in separately), and then you're going to paste that default version into Paint, and you're going to start pasting little chunks in again that represent all the different states of the page. You'll store each of these states in the same folder that you store the default main version. I often call this folder for websites something like: "Ajax Popups."

Regarding Organization, you're going to want to organize all the diagrams for your site/application in a perfect folder tree system just as the site/application would be stored on your server. You're going to want to make a separate version of this whole folder tree once you're ready to enter the Powerpoint phase so that you can gear this new folder tree towards the default versions and ajax popup type stuff mentioned above. The first folder tree will have the most common state for all the page designs (although not the somewhat empty "default" state), and you'll want to deliver that whole folder tree to your design to work on while you do the powerpoints.

Next, you do the Powerpoints. Generally, the first thing I will do is get myself acquainted with the app by doing a Powerpoint that represents the core offering of the app, even if this powerpoint encompasses many pages that otherwise should be addressed individually. For instance, if you have a site where one type of user submits something to another type of user for the other type of user to modify (for example: imagine a site where people submit information about insurance policies), you will have different tools for specific

Potential clients come to us every day concerned about planning their software and how to get their vision across. This is our core offering at FaceySpacey--helping actualize your vision in a way that closes the communication gap 100% with the programmers. I'm going to explain some of our methods right here (although this might put us out of job).





I personally use Paint, Powerpoint and Excel. I build the exact piece of software or website in paint and then I put it into Powerpoint and show every single possible interaction as well as any calculations and how the calculations interact with the database. To show interaction with the database, I show screenshots of tables built in excel.

A lot of the other more specialized tools are just fluff. You need to get straight to the point and visualize it as it is and be able to get right into it right away. Copy and paste screenshots or already existent software and web sites/applications and paste them into paint and copy and paste chunks or pieces between paint windows to achieve the UI you want. This is how you should start. MAKE YOUR SITE LOOK EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD IN PAINT! Take the nav-bar from Youtube, take the newsfeed from Facebook, take the "People You May Know" box from the Linked in user homepage, etc. Paste each chunk into one Paint file. Then start renaming things and re-arranging the sub-components of each component you dropped in. If you need drop-down menus and other forms, just google image search "drop-down menus" etc.

Try to use components from sites for which you would like to mimic the design. Eventually, you'll be giving this stuff to a designer. So capture the essence you will be going for later on now. Once you're done with this, You'll have 2 options depending on your time-framed: Put the exact diagrams you made into PowerPoint and do the remaining 75% of the planning work while the designer designs the pages, or have the designer design the pages AND THEN put those into Powerpoint. Do the later if you have time. Do the former if you don't.

Once you're in Powerpoint, you're going to realize that your diagrams will need to be modified to most easily show some interactions--most specifically ajax animations and the like. You will see that your web-page changes (or desktop application) as the user clicks certain things. You're going to have to go back to Paint, make a more default version of this page (stored in separately), and then you're going to paste that default version into Paint, and you're going to start pasting little chunks in again that represent all the different states of the page. You'll store each of these states in the same folder that you store the default main version. I often call this folder for websites something like: "Ajax Popups."

Regarding Organization, you're going to want to organize all the diagrams for your site/application in a perfect folder tree system just as the site/application would be stored on your server. You're going to want to make a separate version of this whole folder tree once you're ready to enter the Powerpoint phase so that you can gear this new folder tree towards the default versions and ajax popup type stuff mentioned above. The first folder tree will have the most common state for all the page designs (although not the somewhat empty "default" state), and you'll want to deliver that whole folder tree to your design to work on while you do the powerpoints.

Next, you do the Powerpoints. Generally, the first thing I will do is get myself acquainted with the app by doing a Powerpoint that represents the core offering of the app, even if this powerpoint encompasses many pages that otherwise should be addressed individually. For instance, if you have a site where one type of user submits something to another type of user for the other type of user to modify (for example: imagine a site where people submit information about insurance policies), you will have different tools for specific