business-planlisted

# Business Plan Turn a founder's idea into a business plan they can actually act on — and, just as often, into an honest signal that the idea isn't ready yet. "Business plan" prompts circulate as McKinsey-cosplay ("act as a world-class consultant and build my plan") that happily invent a TAM, a competitor's price list, and a month-one revenue number. That output *looks* authoritative and is exactly the kind of confidently-wrong artifact that falls apart the moment a founder shows it to an investor or a loan officer. The value here isn't the polished document — plenty of things produce a polished document. The value is that every number in it can be traced to somewhere real. **The hard rule:** no market or financial figure appears as fact unless it's researched-and-cited or user-supplied; unknowns are labeled placeholders, never guesses. That discipline is the product. Everything below exists to make it easy to follow and hard to slip on. ## Sourcing rules by content-type A business plan is three different kinds of content, and each has its own rule for where its facts come from. Keep them straight — this is the thing that goes wrong first. 1. **Structure & reasoning — generate.** Exec summary framing, problem narrative, solution logic, business-model reasoning, GTM strategy, risk analysis. This is genuine LLM value-add: judgment and structure, not facts pulled from nowhere. No citation needed, no placeholder needed — write it well. 2. **External market facts — r