How to model your business idea

Submitted by Ignacio on
In 2013 I went into a project competition. I wanted to share the check list I built for going from the idea to the business model. I must say though most of the material is in Spanish.

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I must say this is one of those articules that should only be in Spanish. Most of the article makes references to other sources in Spanish and the most interesting thing about it is including the Santiago Bilinkis view about the process, fears & wrong ideas. I don't feel I should translate his articles, so I will only attempt to keep the check list and rough idea of what this article is about in spanish.

We have a business project with my wife and had trouble deciding whether it had potential or not. We decided to participate on a local program/competition for entrepreneurs called Naves. During that course we met a lot of people, learned a lot about entrepreneurship and got a method for evaluating projects.

In a nutshell what you will need to do your best to fill a document called Business plan. It is a time demanding task and it will trigger lots of questions you did not think about. But in the process of filling it out you'll learn a lot about your project and how viable it is to become a real business. Something also useful is the Business Model Canvas. This is less demanding, and not so clear in some senses but it helps too.

I like lots of the articles of Santiago Bilinkis and they cover a wide ground as:
But the ones I liked the most and I appreciate for evaluating your business project is his view of producing a modeling framework for your project using only an spreadsheet. The idea is to put all the different numbers of your business, connecting them all together and ending up with a big spreadsheet that lets you model the impact of them on your business (article also on spanish).

And I want to wrap up the article with a reference to a concept. Before going to look for investors you should have a working model, to achieve that and do not spend all your saving in it you will want to follow the Lean Startup. After you filled your business plan, and if you are still convince it is a good idea, this will let you find the best way to start.