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A business plan in 12 minutes
The imaginary company
The company was imaginary: a button that records 24-hour video and sends it over every 24 hours. Mark Cuban wrote the prompt to see what it would take, asking for a patent, a business plan, and the licensing required. A follow-up asked for the bill of materials and the source companies, the blocking and tackling every company handles early in its life cycle.
The usual path is six months to a prototype and twelve months to launch.
Why wrong plans help
Every business plan ever written in the history of business plans is wrong, and a plan from AI is no different. Still, it works as a guideline and a template, and it gives a direction to head in. A wrong draft still teaches something, and the learning comes from iterating on it.
Why does a hardware prototype take months?
A device goes through industrial design, circuit board layout, firmware, and several rounds of physical testing. Each revision of a circuit board takes weeks to fabricate and assemble, and each failure sends the team back for another round. A product that records video and transmits it also has to pass regulatory testing for its radio emissions. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission handles that authorization.
How does a patent get checked for novelty?
A US patent must be novel and nonobvious, so examiners compare each application against earlier patents and publications, known as prior art. The US Patent and Trademark Office keeps public databases of issued patents and published applications for that search. Drafting software can write claims, but the inventor named on a patent has to be a human. The Federal Circuit confirmed that in Thaler v. Vidal in 2022.
Why is every business plan wrong?
A plan rests on guesses about customers, costs, and timing, and a new company cannot confirm them until it meets the market. Steve Blank, a Stanford lecturer who wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany in 2005, argued that startups are searching for a business model rather than executing a known one. He summed this up by saying that no business plan survives first contact with customers.
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