January of 1995. Few people knew of the Internet, Mozilla, and the world-wide web. The so-called “Internet” had existed for years, but seemed to the rest of us (anybody outside of a few spook havens and ivory towers) like a nerdy background utility for emails. And I started bplans.com. 
I hope you’ve noticed big changes at bplans.com lately: more information, more tutorials, and better organized, making what you’re looking for easier to find. And especially a new membership group. I hope it shows because we’ve put a lot of effort into it.
As part of the recent boom, the team asked me for stories of the so-called old days. When, how, and why did bplans.com get started. So here we go. Let’s call this a collection of loosely related stories:
- A friend came by my office and showed me Mozilla, the first web browser, and the world-wide web. It knocked my socks off. I’d been active in Compuserve and its competition, but here was the whole new world. I was hooked.
- I immediately registered a few obvious domain names. Businessplan.com had already been registered, but bplans.com was, so I registered it.
- I did the earliest bplans.com sites myself, in my spare time, while running a company growing about 50% per year. In 1997 we hired an NYU undergrad to create a better bplans.com site, focusing on business planning and especially publishing sample plans. He worked for us remotely from New York. He’s now in his middle 30s, has become known for his success as CTO of Huffington Post and as of this month as founder of rebelmouse.com. He created a beautiful site very quickly. Within a couple of months it was getting national awards. And yes, that’s my son Paul.
From the beginning, bplans.com was always intended to be a resource site, offering free information. We did the software selling and support business at paloalto.com and gave people free content at bplans.com. I’m not saying it was all generous and altruistic, because from the beginning – and still today – the smart people browsing at bplans figured it was dumb to not spend $99 (or less) on the software behind it. But I am saying it was all free, and we’ve kept it that way.
While I’m happy to post here once a week, I’m posting much more frequently over at my main blog, Planning Startups Stories, which is also hosted on bplans.com. As of the end of 2011 I thought it might be useful to post here about my most read posts over there. These are the most-read posts on that blog for 2011. They are in order of traffic, page views, which isn’t the same as quality, but still, what better measure is there? . Links into certain pages affect these results. So here are the 10 favorite posts, based on page views:
- 8 factors that make a good business plan. A 2009 post that’s withstood the test of time; I still like it.
- 10 traits of successful entrepreneurs. This is another 2009 post. On this one I have mixed feelings, to be honest; I think entrepreneurs are all different, and have few traits in common. I’d be happy to hear what you think.
- Read this before getting an MBA degree. Behind the scenes, one of my daughters was thinking about it, and I wrote this for her. I wanted her to do it, she decided not to; so much for my persuasiveness.
- 3 stories your business strategy depends on. I like this as a good strategy summary for the rest of us. Not academic at all.
- Read this before hiring a coach or consultant. My skepticism shows up on this one. Watch out for shark-filled waters.
- 5 Non-traditional ways to get startup money. This is a good list and a good reminder that it isn’t all about angel investors or venture capital.
- My recommendation about your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Which begins with the reminder that it’s publishing, not private.
- 10 lessons learned in 22 years of bootstrapping. This is my personal favorite for this list. I just reposted it here two days ago.
- Business planning isn’t about pages. This one is a bit of a rant.
- Angels vs. VCs on business pitches. Too often we lump these categories together, as if they all want the same thing. They don’t.
My readership on that blog and this one has grown again this year, and I thank you for that. Page views and readers make that worth it to me. Thank you. And may you have a happy, healthy, safe, and personally profitable new year.
Did you miss any of Tim’s posts this past week? Let me just quickly sum up what you might have missed. Are you smart? Have you failed? Read this book. Check out Gust. Save the pie for yourself.
Mmmm pie.
Are you hoping to find angel investment for your startup? Are you looking to invest in startups? Go look at gust.com. It’s a better-than-ever first step.
I’ve become increasingly more convinced that the best sign of real intelligence is being able to see both sides, or all sides, or any argument. You might call that having an open mind. You might call it listening. And you might call it having the good sense to say “I don’t know” a lot.
I say entrepreneurs should agree on full disclosure in their bios. We should list not just our successes, but also the failures. Nobody lists the failures.
Too often people in startups think they’re supposed to give pieces of their company away to people who help them. They aren’t. Or they think it’s clever to pay people for services by giving away pieces of their fledgling company. It isn’t.
Yesterday while flying cross country I read State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. It’s about real people in an almost-but-not-quite magical Amazon jungle, and, although the plot moves steadily forward, it’s more of a spell, woven with words by a great writer, than just a story.
Did you miss any of Tim’s posts this past week? You know the drill…
It’s funny — well, maybe annoying is a better word — how one of the so-called trappings of success is criticism.
Is entrepreneurship contagious? Think about it, and consider this: Obesity is contagious, so is quitting smoking, and so is divorce. Why not entrepreneurship?
I revised my timberry.com website a couple of months ago and one of the additions was the ask me page where I offering to answer questions people ask. This question came to me from that page and I think it might be a useful answer for this blog.
Are you minding your business? I’ve found through the years of minding my business that most of the important insight in the numbers comes in lines, not dots. I mean that tracking the change in key indicators over time, with lines, is much more valuable than looking at them at any specific point, as a dot.
Even while traveling and teaching full day classes, Tim continues to bring daily content. Did you miss one? That’s ok, I’ve got you covered.
I liked the phrase social entrepreneurship instantly when I first heard it. It’s doing well by doing good, I assumed, building businesses that help people. A business doesn’t have to not make a profit to do good, so the idea of social entrepreneurship makes sense.
I admit I probably shouldn’t be posting this because I’m not an attorney, so I don’t give legal advice. This is just anecdotal, based on what I’ve seen in my business experience. Consult your attorney. I worked for years with a smart, honest business lawyer who — well, let me get to that later in this post.
During my class at the ASBDC, something that came up in discussion and generated total consensus in the group was that the business plan document written by an outsider isn’t useful. I referenced my worst-ever consulting engagement, one of my favorite posts on this blog. Everybody in the room agreed that business planning is something you do, not something you buy. It’s a process, not a finished document.
Whether it’s email, Twitter, Facebook, or — going back to the ancient days — even business letters and proposals, the single most powerful word in business writing is….
Yesterday at about 6 pm I was with a few dozen people in the terminal that United Air Lines uses in the San Diego airport. Things did not look good. We’d been without power for more than two hours, and, according to what we learned via mobile phones and iPads and such — there was no wireless, because there was no power — the power was out for at least 50 miles to the north, maybe 100 miles to the south, and all the way to New Mexico to the east.
Did you miss any of Tim’s great posts from the last week? Never fear, we’ve got them listed out below. Click to your hearts content!
Are you running a business, or an organization, or a team? For a quick rating of your own leadership, ask yourself these questions about bad news:
1. How quickly do you get the bad news? and 2. How do you respond to bad news?
Brian Solis, author of Engage, expert on social media for business, posted The End of Social Media 1.0 last week on his blog. Not that there is a 2.0 or 3.0 exactly, he explains, but he says we’re at an inflection point.
Am I being too critical? Do you react like I do to blatant spelling errors? Do they spoil messages for you?
I caught Ted Coiné’s 12 Most Irrefutable Laws of Business Heresy the other day. I really like that list. And it’s a great title for a post. And it’s an excellent post, great advice coming one delightful rule after another.
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