3.1 BP - Business Plan
This document precedes 3.2 BGT - Budget cash forecast and succeeds none
This document has a template
Below is a recommended structure of a company pitch deck
Company Purpose
- Define the company/business in a single declarative sentence
Problem
- Describe the pain of the customer (or the customer's customer)
- Outline how the customer addresses the issue today
Solution / Value Proposition
- Demonstrate your company's value proposition to make the customer's life better
- Show where your product physically sits
- Provide use cases
Market Validation / Why Now?
- Set-up the historical evolution of your category
- Define recent trends that make your solution possible
Market size
- Identify/ profile the customer you cater to
- Calculate the TAM (top down), SAM (bottoms up) and SOM
Product
- Product line-up (form factor, functionality, features, architecture, intellectual property)
- Development roadmap
Business Model / Marketing Plan / Go-to Market
- Revenue model
- Pricing
- Average account size and/or lifetime value
- Sales & distribution model
- Customer/pipeline list
Competition
- List competitors
- List competitive advantages
Founding Team
- Founders & Management
- Board of Directors/Board of Advisors
Financial / Use of Funds
- P&L
- Balance sheet
- Cash flow
- Cap table
- The deal
Refer to 
Crash-test questions (Y-Combinator)
1. Problem
- What problem are you solving?
- What problem will be solved at the end of what you are doing?
- What do we expect the result to be?
- Can you state the problem clearly in two sentences?
- Have you experienced the problem yourself?
- Can you define this problem narrowly?
- Who can you help first?
- What can we address immediately?
- How do we get the first indication this thing is working?
- Is the problem solvable?
2. Customer
- Who is your customer?
- Who is the ideal first customer
- How will they know if your product has solved the problem?
- How often (frequency) does your user have the problem?
- Who is getting the most value out of your product?
- How intense is the problem?
- Are they willing to pay?
- How easy is it for your customer to find your product?
- Which customers should you run away from?
3. Product
- Does your product actually solve the problem? Be truthful. How and why not?
- Which customers should you go after first?
- How do you find people who are willing to use your "bad" first versions of your product?
- Who are the most desperate customers and how do you talk to them first?
- Whose business is going to go out of business without using you?
- Are you discounting or starting with a super low price? Are you considering this approach? If so, why?
4. Performance
- What are you using to measure how users are interacting with your product?
- What 5-10 metrics are you measuring to understand how your product functions? Why those metrics?
- When you build a new product or feature, what is the metric that will improve because of that feature/product?
- What number do you track to show how well your company is doing?
- What is your top level KPI (revenue, usage)?
- What are the underlying metrics that contribute to achieving your top level KPI (new users, retention of users, content created => DAUs at Social Cam)?
- Which of these metrics are you trying to move this development cycle?
5. Product Development
- How long is your product dev cycle? What is causing it to be that long?
- Who is writing down notes at your product dev meeting?
- Which category does each of your brainstormed ideas fit: New features/interactions on existing ones; bug fixes/other maintenance; A/B tests?
- How easy/medium/hard are they to do?
- How can you restate the hard ideas (disaggregate idea into smaller ideas)?
- What parts of hard ideas are useless or hard? Are there other options?
- Which hard idea will improve act the KPI the most? Which medium? Which easy?
- What is the spec for the product/feature we want to build?