It has been said more times than not that you need a business plan to succeed. A well-documented plan that will guide you from start to finish on creating your successful company. I never created one for 9rules and I’m pretty sure we never did one for Business Logs either. Has that helped us or hurt us? I’m not sure, but I am happy with where both are at now and there was always one problem: we kept moving.
Not physically moving, but as we got to know not only each other, but the landscape of what we were working in we found better ways to go about things and created new strategies. The end goal has remained the same, but the paths we are taking are greatly different than what we started with.
9rules mixes a lot of ideas and concepts from web’s past and we remix them in new ways. We aren’t always sure what will stick and what won’t so we have tried to remain as agile as possible. At times we probably don’t move fast enough for our own good, but I could see how trying to stick to one plan would do us more harm than good.
I’m definitely not saying great planning won’t remove a lot of headaches, but make sure you leave room in your plans for change. We can read about being agile all we want, but actually being agile is something completely different and it seems more and more companies are getting stuck with this issue. You create a blog network at the peak of the blog network era and you have your plans laid out, but the market changes so what do you do now? Or what if your a blog search engine and even though you lead the pack, what can you really do when Google and Yahoo enter the arena?
We are in a time where everyone can copy everyone so easily with regards to technology how does your plans account for that? Sure you can analyze the current competition, but what about the guys that launch a week after you? The more you move and faster you move the harder it is for your competition to keep up and the only way you can really do that is by remaining agile. Plan it out, but don’t write it in stone.
Originally posted on September 20, 2006 @ 5:04 pm