Nautis

 Nobody reads a 40-page business plan. Not investors, not your co-founder, and honestly, not you after the first week. The long-form plan is a relic from a time when you needed a bank loan and the loan officer wanted a doorstop to feel reassured. For a startup, that document is a way to feel productive without learning anything. A useful business plan template does the opposite: it's short enough to actually use and harsh enough to expose what you don't know. The two pages that do the work Start with the problem and the customer, because everything else depends on getting this right. Who is hurting, how badly, and how do they cope today? Name the specific person and the specific pain. If you find yourself writing "businesses need better solutions for," delete it and try again with a real human in mind. Then the solution and why you. What you're building, and why your team is the one to build it. Keep it to a paragraph. The point isn't to describe every fea...