The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan is a very interesting take on how to combine money and entrepreneurship move us all forward.
I very much agree that entrepreneurship is a great driver - for both society and economy - and seeing someone proposing “an open source funding environment” is highly stimulating, because it combines open source and entrepreneurship.
Mark Cuban asks for business plans to be published on his web site and sets up a number of rules, and he will reply to the ones he finds interesting. The rules are tough and their fairness can be discussed - as well as the requirement that you publish your idea.
Two of the rules stand out, however, namely number three and four:
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3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
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This obviously puts some limits on the amount of technology and research can be required for the business idea (which is probably also the intention), but they might also be useful as a way to test and evaluate your new business concept.
As evangelized in my post Finding the Killer App, I believe any new business concept or product idea should be checked against its killer application - i.e. “What does it do that everybody wants?”
Based on the above rules, perhaps we should consider another test of our business idea (especially when funding is short): “How can it make it break even in 60 days?”
This kind of litmus test will help you do two things:
- Reconsider your business idea one more time to see if you can do it without funding and how far you can go, and;
- Be extremely creative in how you can start up small with just the bare necessities and validate your concept before spending a lot of time and money.
For my part, I will definitely keep this in mind for my next projects.
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