Business plan v planning business

[drllau]

The lean startup movement have popularised the business canvas, focusing on the "model" in contrast with traditional financiers (read bankers) who like business plans. This picture shows the connection, the conceptual model comes from the business canvas, and from this you derive financial guesstimates. However, the value is not in the numbers themselves but in the discrepencies with actual business results because that is where real learning takes plan and hypotheses are rejected. So the raw data one gets from web analytics (assuming a decent sample size), need to be interpreted and acted upon meaningfully. This also acts as a test of what customers do versus what they say (there's psychological papers which talk about confirmation bias). Too often people say what they think the interviewer wants to hear so the ability to derive real insight based on objective information is a key advance of internet startups over traditional SMEs.