Startup Day1: Be a player, forget the business plan.

It's not a secret no business plan survives the first contact with customers; and still, entrepreneurs write business plans and it's what Venture Capital firms and Business Angels ask for.

As entrepreneur I've written more than one business plan and, looking back, I can assure you it was a complete waist of my time, and believe me, when you are starting up, time is a scarce resource.

Why is a business plan worthless when you are in the early stage of your startup? Today, more than ever before, we live in a wildly changing marketplace and, while you are busy writing very specific details of how your startup is going to be in the future, the present just changes. Most of the business plans have nothing to do with what the business eventually become and it is because, when you start, you'll find for sure many things you didn't expect. In that moment, your business plan becomes meaningless.

I can't imagine fourteen years old Jordan, writing in a journal about how he was going to play professional basketball, what obstacles would find and how it would improve his game every day. He loved the sport and, as a consequence, he trained, and trained a lot. He played hard to become an expert in his field, in his case, to become simply the best. Malcom Gladwell in his book "The Outliers: story of success" (one of the best business books I've ever read) repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

Wait, do I mean that before you start a business you don't need to create any document? No, I don't mean that. As former US President Eisenhower used to say "plans are worthless, but planning is everything". A plan is like a parked car; planning is taking that car on a trip.

Before you start playing, you must know where your opportunity is and what you can offer to the market.

What do I sugest:

1- Define your idea and your goal (dream, and dream big. It costs the same)

2- Create a Business Model instead of a Business Plan. It's different. A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. It doesn't anticipate the future. It is a definition of the strengths of your startup. It is fast, dynamic and very useful in this stage. For this, I strongly recommend the "Business Model Canvas" by Alex Osterwalder.

3- Start playing.

At the beginning, although you can feel tempted to create a business plan because investors require it, a good investor is able to see that in this stage of the project, it makes little sense. A business model includes everything needed to get started.

In a second stage, once you've sold to your market, with field experience and more accurate revenue and expenditure data, you can create a business plan for a series A round. But don't be much optimistic, you'll be always trying to predict something you don't really control.

Just for reference, if you look back to companies like Google or Facebook, see they started with no business plan from day1, but focused on solving a problem. In doing so, they realized they were starting to build something really valuable.

So, be a player. And play hard.