The question that was asked was:

Do You Need a Business Plan to Start a Business?

Here was my full response:

You don’t need one to start a business necessarily. You can navigate entrepreneurship for quite a while without a business plan, especially if you aren’t looking for any capital.

There’s nothing preventing you from getting your first client, building an app and attracting users, or selling things on Etsy without a business plan.

But, the moment that you want to start treating your passion as a business and not a coincidental success, you’ll want to write up a plan. Even if you don’t need funding, a business plan acts as a roadmap to ensure that you have all of the components that you need in order to grow sustainably as far as team, execution, product/service mix, and marketing/sales strategy are concerned. Honestly, many a crisis could be averted if new business owners or hobbiepreneurs would go through the exercise of creating a business plan. There’s even more value in keeping it updated every year with new goals and targets, and making sure that your business and brand is still in alignment with your original mission, vision, and core values, and keeping up with how the industry is evolving versus getting blindsided by it later and trying to figure out how they got into that position.