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Plan Cruncher - shorter business plans


03 Mar 2010

min read

Lunatech Ventures has just launched Plan Cruncher, which helps you create a better business plan. The Plan Cruncher web application was designed and built by Lunatech Research for Lunatech Ventures, in a typical example of the close collaboration between our software development and investment activities.

What Plan Cruncher does

Plan Cruncher creates a standard one-page summary of a business plan for a start-up company that is looking for external investment. You do this by choosing icons that represent some of the standard answers that a business plan must provide.These icons fulfill the same purpose as the icons for the Creative Commons licenses - they serve as abbreviations for fairly straightforward ideas such as 'advertising revenue model', which are backed up by a long detailed description (in your actual business plan).

Why investors want entrepreneurs to use Plan Cruncher

Plan Cruncher saves investors’ time. To investors, business plans all look more or less the same, which is not necessarily abad thing, and they are always too long, which is. Before an investor decides to wade into your ten or twenty-page document, he wants straight answers to a few basic questions about your plan.Plan Cruncher generates a standard one-page summary that investors can use to screen business plans and compare them to each other.

How Plan Cruncher helps you write a better business plan

Plan Cruncher’s icons remind you which questions your business plan must answer.

  1. Are you ambitious? Can you build a business?

  2. Do you have the skills to build the product or service?

  3. Can you already demo the product?

  4. Have you worked out how to monetise the product?

  5. How much investment capital do you need?

  6. Do you have a revenue forecast?

  7. How long will it take to reach profitability?

If your plan’s executive summary is good, it can answer these questions in less than 30 seconds. Plan Cruncher gives you that summary.

Example - you are working on a great new idea

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A revolutionary new idea that you are building yourself…You have a team that can build it…You have a prototype you can demo…You are gathering users… and need an investment to develop the product to the point where you charge them for the service.

Example - a lot of hot air and a totally unrealistic valuation

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The idea is all you have, so you want us to sign an NDA… You do not know how you are going make money… You want to use someone else’s money to build it… So basically you have nothing, but have somehow come up with a valuation where 10% is the funding you need.

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