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@Velocio
We have a pitch deck, not a business plan.
The pitch deck has numbers, they were based on us hedging our position instead of pushing hard and going hard.
Business plans tend not to exist for startups because of a simple reason: They're usually nothing more than an unusually obscure form of science fiction.
Business plans make total sense when the business and all of it's attributes are known factors.
If you open a restaurant it's well understood what the industry standards are for table occupancy, the cost to acquire a customer, the cost of the food, the established costs of serving the customer, the prices the market can bear, the footfall in a particular area, the style of food liked by various demographics.
Business plans make perfect sense for every type of business that can borrow on a debt basis from High St Banks. This is actually 80% of the UK market... known models, and the plan proves you know the model.
Where the business plan falls down is when all of the variables become unknown, when you are attempting to enter a market where your ability to reach it is unproven, where you may be creating an entirely new market, when your product forges into an area that other companies haven't gone.
For those businesses the accepted rule is to test early, learn quickly, and adapt. That's the essence of the Lean Startup movement, and the whole idea of the startup "pivot".
The vast majority of VCs and investors understand that the idea as it is originally may not be the one you eventually succeed with, and that the original market you aim at may not be the one that you eventually serve.
As such, the business plan is very much considered to be absolute fiction, a waste of time.
Instead, investors will do what they have been doing to us... they'll make intros with industry experts and have them tear us a new one and test the fundamental proposition. If you've watched the penultimate episode of "The Apprentice" you'll know what this looks like.
It's been those meetings that have really revealed to us how strong a proposition we have, how well we understand it. And it's those meetings that are leading large investors to have started to say "Shut up and take my money". And it's all of that which is leading to our increased belief that if we're hitting those buttons we must be doing something right.
I am very happy to share the numbers we have, which were hedged towards a safe and steady growth with reduced risk... but we're very much leaning towards "What if we were aggressive on the sales and customer acquisition... what if we tried to reach existing forums rather than grow as they came to us?".
If you would like to see the pitch deck, then email me at david@microcosm.cc and I will send you a copy.
But note: The numbers will now be revised for a much heavier emphasis on sales, and supporting that. Hence, they will be ramped up a lot higher and a lot sooner, but at far greater costs (all those sales and marketing people we'd have to hire).
A pitch deck is as close to a business plan that a startup has.
As for Seedrs... their game is to normalise these pitches, and thus they have their own form and the pitch deck that we have does not fit it. But I can respond to a Q&A once it is live and share the pitch deck there, that's apparently a way around the structure of their proposal.