nah. we never had a business plan and are still going strong 11 years later. 99.999% is a gross exaggeration of reality.

we’ll never actually have this data, but I bet there isn’t much correlation if any between having a business plan and being successful.

have you started a successful business?

I think this was their business plan. See if it works and, if it doesn't, shut it down

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/btop3zhg/production/6cdd8502a5fd...

Closest thing I could find poking around.

Here is an example of one of their core growth plan items from the strategy above:

"Social Media Campaigns, Organic and Paid Driving key messages around digital hygiene, decentralisation, and security on social media platforms to raise awareness."

The whole pdf is basically a collection of the remedial "go-to" SaaS growth blog posts everyone thinking about startups read: make content, build a community, turn your community into advocates, write about things people care about etc etc.

Given I've done this stuff for some 20+ years now, here is what is missing and frankly what most folks miss/don't want to admit:

This document basically has no ICP, who is the ideal customer? What is their persona? Who specifically are they, like, super specifically! You can't start with "oh anyone who wants anon-privacy first msg'ing!" That would have been like me at digitalocean saying "oh it's for anyone who needs a VM" - you can't execute a series of steps with that, you can't boil the ocean so to speak, we had to work through communities one at a time, we did: rails, node, php, devops/config management, in that order, split up over quarters and years, maybe it looked like we just...did developers, but we didn't, we slowly worked our way through all the developer communities slightly tailoring towards them while keeping things general enough.

The biggest problem here tho is the classic vitamin vs. aspirin problem. They're selling "better privacy" and "decentralization" - these are vitamins for the vast majority of people - they're things people say they care about in surveys but don't actually switch apps for. The 85% of adults who "want to do more to protect their privacy" aren't switching off WhatsApp. Are they the most secure messenger, or are they a token ecosystem with staking? Those attract fundamentally different people with different motivations...so just bolting them together creates confusion.

Folks need to stop thinking "we're going to do marketing" = "we're going to build a business" marketing, go to market, growth.. these are tiny components of overall business strategy. </rant>

Slack (originally an MMO), Nintendo (card games), Nokia (rubber shoes) and Netflix (DVDs over snail mail) would disagree.

"We'll gather a bunch of talented people together, figure out what this industry needs and then do that, let's hope we can do that before the money runs out" can be a viable business plan. There's no guarantee it's going to work, there's never a guarantee a plan is going to work, but it can work sometimes.

> I feel like a crazy person for having to write this, but: if you are starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses), then you need to have a business plan.

Not in tech you don't. The business plan these days is try and get as much investment money as you can to redistribute to your friends, have a few parties, hand out some Macbooks and try to get acquired by Google before your runway runs out.

When I was in college, we were required to take a business class (Business 101) that mandated a finished business plan as part of the project.

It had to be long, in-depth, and include everything you mentioned.

I was incredibly surprised when I entered the tech and startup workforce that these were generally absent.

I had misunderstood the class and instructor and thought that you couldn't even start a business without one.

Then, when I started raising money for my own venture, I thought for sure a complete business plan was a prerequisite.

Nope. A few graphs, preferably hockey-shaped, and a good story were all that was necessary.

My venture failed, of course. But if I were to do it again, I would do myself the favor of having a complete plan. It would definitely save a lot of headaches and guessing in the moment.

Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions. Maybe this also correlates with qualities like blind optimism, or disbelief in institutions like capitalism?