Name, title, company, website
Founder & CEO, NerdWallet
Describe your business
Kayak for credit cards. A dead simple tool to find the right credit card.
Do you have a written business plan?
Nope. If I had felt that writing a business plan was a necessary step to launching NerdWallet, I probably never would've gotten over the inertia and taken that first big step. Business plans, especially at the beginning, are more noise than signal.
If you have a business plan, do you refer to it often?
We've pivoted our strategy in some way nearly every week since launch, so if we had drawn up a written plan before we truly understood the business and then felt the need to stick to it, we probably would've paralyzed ourselves.Advice
- When you decide you want to start a business, just do it. Don't wait until you have a fully formulated idea, or you'll never get going. Just start working/writing/programming, or whatever it is you need to do, and learn on the move
- I built a web business, so my initial challenge was to learn how to program and learn how to build a web app. There are tons of resources for programmers throughout the internet, and there is an unreal amount of open source code for you to study and/or copy
- The easiest way to avoid ever having to write a business plan is to fund the business yourself