How to write a business plan for an Internet startup?
mixmax: I've written more business plans than I care to think about. This is my experience:1) A business plan is a marketing document. Usually you are using it to sell your business to banks, investors or partners. You have to think of your audience when you write it. An investor likes to see projected revenues that are high and don't mind that there's a risk - banks are the other way around.2) Don't use business plans as a plan of how to run your company, write a one page strategy note instead. I have never seen a businessplan that was followed 100% and turned into a successful business. Everything changes fast in a startup, and you have to adapt accordingly.3) Make sure you don't write something in your businessplan you can't honor. Investors and banks will look at it and blame you if they invested money and you don't live up to what you have written. Make sure to have escape routes. (If this and this market condition is true we will do such and such, if it isn't we can't do jack shit, we expect to do such and such but require this or that to reach these lofty goals) This will give you leverage and deniability in later negotiations.4) Make sure you use a lot of sources to underpin and validate your assumptions (Gartner projects that within  the next five years this trend will do something, making it inevitable that we will make loads of money since we're currently the only ones in this business) This will lend you credibility.5) Make good budgets, and talk about your assumptions in the business plan. Budgets are the first thing investors look at. Particularly the assumptions behind the numbers.6) Beware of investors that think everything in your business plan is a road map that simply needs to be followed in order to attain fame, glory and fuck-you money: They don't know what they're talking about.