"Your business model, including 3- or 5-year financial projections that include sales, profits, cash flows, and returns on investment."
How can anyone reasonably predict where their N-month old company is going to be in 3-5 years?
How can anyone reasonably predict where their N-month old company is going to be in 3-5 years?
Yes technology is impossible to predict but they want to see that you've given it more thought then, we don't need revenue Google buys us in year 2!!!1!
That said, business plans can be useful and help the founders solidify their business model, predict costs, etc. If anything, it helps you get a vague idea of what to expect a few years down the road instead of just the next 60 days.
I would guess the vast majority of tech entrepreneurs would disagree with the implication that business plans are generally useful.
I think generally it's good to think about these things because the process is more valuable than the plan itself.
It's really not a bad idea to set up a business model with a set of variables defined from which you base your projections. When I do this, I make it very easy to drop in actuals and have the projections auto updated based on the collected metrics over the original projected ones.
That said, St. Louis isn't impossible. Strangeloop STL is one of the hands-down, bar none, best conferences in the country each year; Slicehost did quite well for themselves from there; Jack Dorsey goes back home all the time (a co-founder of Square is from the Lou, and the swipe-powered dongle technology comes out of Wash U); and it's not like Chicago's all that far away.
By the time you move a team you may exceed $50,000 in expenses.
Anyone who is really serious will not take $50,000 to move to St. Louis.
And of course there are exceptions, like someone who has family in St. Louis, or someone who does know investors there etc.
2) this is especially true living in a part of the country with a reasonable cost of living. Somewhere like Missouri, $50k is two reasonable years of runway for a single 20-something (even in a metro area like St Louis, you'll be able to rent for ~$400 .)
3) it's pretty ridiculous (and arrogant) to assume that nowhere else in the country can you get investors.