In this Ask Evan episode, Evan Carmichael answers a forum question from a viewer named Anthony who asks whether a solid business plan should be the first step when starting a business. Evan argues that it should not. He explains that before drafting a plan you need a clear understanding of the market, which comes from talking directly to potential customers, uncovering their pain points, and building a solution around those needs. He shares a personal story about an earlier venture where he spent a summer writing a detailed business plan, only to discover that the target customers didn’t care about the product. The plan proved useless when the market was tested. Evan stresses that a business plan should be an evolving document, updated as you gain real‑world feedback, new opportunities, and changing costs. His core recommendation: start with customer discovery, secure a few early orders, then create a business plan that reflects the validated market and can guide scaling, team building, and facility expansion. The video ends with a call for viewers to like, comment, and ask further questions.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today's question comes from one of my forum readers, Anthony, who wrote in asking about a business plan, and he said, "Is a good business plan the first thing that you need to do to start a business?" As much of a fan of business plans that I am, Anthony, and thank you for the question, I think a lot of people go through that question as well. I don't think it's the first thing that you should do. And the reason being, when you're creating your business plan, you should really have a good sense of your market and what you're gonna do to create your product and service and sell it. And in the early stages of a business, what you really need to do is start talking to customers to figure out what kind of business you should launch. And the best type of business you can launch is start talking— is building around your customers. So you go start talking to potential customers, find out what their problems are, their pain points, and try to develop a solution that can help them. And we made this mistake in one of my earlier companies. We spent an entire summer drafting a business plan that we thought was awesome, and of course our customers are gonna want this product, and this is, you know, the best thing ever. We spent so much time researching and figured we had the best thing. But then when we, you know, got to actually launching, it turns out that, you know, the customer we were going after didn't really care or give us the time of day. Now luckily we had, you know, enough still in our product to make it successful and we were able to find other customers. We spent all this time creating this business plan that we thought was amazing, and then when we went out to actually test it in the market, we found out that it didn't hold any water. So the best thing you can do at the beginning, when you're first starting your business or you're thinking about starting a business, is go start talking to customers, and they'll tell you what they need, what they like, how you can help them, and from there you'll get the information you need to be able to create your business plan. The danger of doing it the other way is your business plan will be useless and extinct, you know, the day you actually start going out and marketing your product. As you launch your business, your business plan is going to change. You're going to get new opportunities, customers will come with new problems, your marketing strategy will change, your expenses might change a little bit. So your business plan will constantly have to change a little bit, but it's best if you can to have a good concept from the beginning built around what you know will sell and what customers want. So my number 1 thing if you're starting a business is just go start talking to customers. Find out their problems, build a solution around their needs, and then once you've got a sense of what their challenges are and you're able to get a couple orders ideally coming in, you can create your business plan on how you're going to create this company out of this idea and be able to grow and expand to other companies, build a team, build your facilities if you need to, and continue to grow the business. So hopefully that helps, Anthony. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I always love seeing those come in. And if you have a thought for Anthony or you have a question, I'd love to hear it if you wanna leave a comment underneath the video. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
