Entrepreneurship: Plan B

Most new ventures, even those with venture capital backing, share one common characteristic. They fail. But there is a better way to launch new ideas—without wasting years of your time and loads of investors’ money. This better way is about discovering a business model that really works: a Plan B which grows out of the original idea, builds on it, and once it’s in place, enables the business to grow rapidly and prosper.

via Techcrunch Europe

Why I blog this: 

Plan A is usually an idea that emerges from something you observe: a behavior, problem or bigger trend.

If you decide to follow your idea and dig deeper into the industry, the necessary technology, the economics, analyze the behavior in more detail – simply ‘live’ with this idea and thoughts for a while – your picture of what is actually going on becomes clearer every day.

Some initial ideas, the A Plans, might get confirmed and develop into successful businesses. Others will have to be abandoned (with or without actually starting a business).

Either way, the result for our entrepreneur always is that she knows more (usually by several magnitudes) about the ‘market’. This might be the reason that we see so many successful B Plans: they might still be bold, but they are also a lot more realistic.

Does this mean that specialists, who know a market intimately are more likely to hit a home run the first time around? I don’t think so, for several reasons… but that’s probably a different discussion.

Thoughts?