My experience was that we spent way too much time writing a business plan and planning things. Since the idea was really impossible to project, we couldn’t really say what was going to happen and there was a tendency to over plan, so we did better when we planned less and tried more. The relationship between planning and acting should be highly skewed towards acting. The planning part should be iterative and an ongoing part of your process. What I learned is it’s better to do it continually as a living document rather than try to figure out all your problems upfront because we learned more in the first month after starting our business than we did in a year in terms of planning our business.
Matt Flannery, Co-Founder of Kiva.org