When launching Gilt Groupe, an online shopping site that currently has 3m members, the co-founders did not trouble to write a traditional business plan. Instead Alexis Maybank, 35 and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, 33, took what they had learnt from Harvard Business School and bypassed the formality.
“You could have taken a good month to write a beautiful 40-page business plan, but you could have lost a critical month in getting your product to market,” says Ms Maybank, who adds that competition was coming quickly. “You don’t really know how an idea is going to take off before putting it in front of customers.”
And they did just that. The two founders used a short presentation to convey their idea to the venture capitalists they had found through the business school network. After initial investment it took only two months to build a site that was ready to test.