This article was published on March 3, 2010

Plan Cruncher Makes Business Plans Look Awesome


Plan Cruncher Makes Business Plans Look Awesome

plancruncherIf you’re an aspiring entrepreneur and struggling with a pile of papers that are supposed to look like a business plan, then plan cruncher might just be the site for you. It allows you to create an one-page overview of your business idea in just a few simple steps.

Developed for Dutch investment firm Lunatech Ventures, Plan Cruncher could be a very useful tool for a lot of startups.  However, the site will probably serve more as a check list of the critical requirements for a business than a replacement for the actual plan since it’ll be tough to find investment on the basis of a one page summary.

Crunching Your Plan is a matter of 6 sets of questions.  Firstly, you’ll need to describe your idea and how well refined and top secret it is.  Next up is the team: who are you, do you cover the business side or the development side and do you know the right people to make this happen.  You may think The Product is most important but that only comes halfway through, closely followed by the revenue model.  Finally, state your funding requirements, what you plan to spend the money on and what you’re willing to give away for it.  Getting this far means you have a business idea and now the beginning of a plan!

Just going through this process will make developers think about the importance of revenue models and partnerships before seeking funding.  Busy investors are always looking for a way to reduce the time it takes to go through all the plans they are sent and cut right to the chase on each one.  Therefore, if a couple of VCs start putting their weight behind this then it could become more widely seen.

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The site itself is nice and straightforward with a clean interface, logos to represent the different elements and it takes literally minutes to generate your plan.  It’s also completely free and you can download the result via PDF.  Here’s one I made earlier – consider this a free idea to anyone who thinks they can do it.

plancatcher_sample

If you are still looking for inspiration after this, then try the startup ideas generator.

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