Ten Businesses in an Afternoon
I built a system that writes scoped business plans and produced ten of them before dinner. The shortlist I made afterwards was the wrong output. What I should have written instead was a kill rule.
There are ten businesses in a folder on my laptop, and they took one afternoon.
Each one is properly scoped: the market, the buyer, why the incumbent solution fails, where the first hundred customers come from, what it costs to build. They are not prompts or one-line notions but the document you would take into a room.
A system I built produced them, and the obvious reading of that is wrong. The machine did not have the ideas. They came from places I already knew something about — communities I have watched for years, failure modes that have annoyed me personally, markets where everyone has complained about the same unfixed problem in the same forum thread for a decade. The machine did the writing up: the structuring, the sizing, the honest paragraph about why the idea might not work. That part used to take a weekend per idea, which rationed how many ideas ever got past a napkin.
My first instinct was the old one: read all ten, rank them, pick two, bin the rest. I had a shortlist before I noticed what I was doing.
A business plan was never the bottleneck; nobody has failed for lack of a document. The scarce input was taste, knowing which idea is worth a year of your life, and the plan was a proxy for it, a check on whether an idea survived being written down. That check has stopped working. Good ideas used to die unwritten. Now bad ideas arrive with a market section, a go-to-market plan and a confident tone, and a weak idea written up well looks like a strong one until you have spent six months on it.
A shortlist made on a laptop is a prediction of winners from a document, using the signal I have just said cannot be trusted. Ranking ten plans that all read well is a coin toss with paragraphs.
The better move is to stop adjudicating on paper. If a plan costs an afternoon, a small real launch in front of people free to ignore it is not far behind, and it is cheaper than a good guess. What has to be decided in advance is not which idea wins but what failure looks like: what a thing has to show, and by when, or it stops. That gets written down before I know the answer and while I have no stake in it, so I cannot move the line later.
Taste did not disappear. It moved, from guessing which of the ten deserves a year to deciding which do not deserve another week. The folder is not a list to whittle down but a list of things to put in front of people and let them answer.
The useful output of the afternoon is not a shorter list. It is a kill rule, written before I start.