MBA New Venture Launch Plan Template

New Venture Launch Plan: [Venture name, founders and start date]

A working plan that takes a new venture from a chosen opportunity to the end of its first 18 months: the opportunity statement, the founding team and its agreements, a register of the hypotheses the venture must test, the customer discovery plan, the business model, the minimum viable product (MVP) and experiments, unit economics, an 18-month operating and cash plan with milestones, the financing plan, the legal set-up checklist, hiring, decision gates with pivot or stop criteria, a risk register and the reporting routine. It is for MBA students in a new venture or launch course, founders on an accelerator or school venture programme, and search or corporate venture teams who need a disciplined first 18 months. The worked example follows Mallowpine Labs, a fictional software start-up for independent pharmacies, with every number computed in Python. Source basis: entrepreneurship research on opportunity (Shane and Venkataraman 2000), effectuation (Sarasvathy 2001), discovery-driven planning (McGrath and MacMillan 1995), experimentation (Kerr, Nanda and Rhodes-Kropf 2014; Camuffo, Cordova, Gambardella and Spina 2020) and lean start-up practice (Blank 2013), written in original words. Replace every [bracketed] value and every row marked Example. This is a planning aid, not legal, tax, investment or financial advice.

Document control

Contents

1. Purpose and how the plan works
2. Opportunity statement
3. Founding team, roles and agreements
4. Hypotheses register
5. Customer discovery plan
6. Business model
7. MVP and experiments
8. Unit economics
9. 18-month operating and cash plan
10. Financing plan
11. Legal and administrative set-up
12. Hiring plan
13. Metrics, decision gates and pivot or stop criteria
14. Risk register
15. Governance and reporting
16. Quality checklist
17. Common mistakes

1. Purpose and how the plan works

A new venture faces uncertainty that a conventional business plan hides. McGrath and MacMillan (1995) proposed discovery-driven planning: write down the assumptions the plan rests on, test the most important ones first and cheaply, and commit more resources only as assumptions turn into knowledge. Kerr, Nanda and Rhodes-Kropf (2014) describe entrepreneurship itself as experimentation whose cost determines which ideas get tried; Camuffo and colleagues (2020) found in a randomised trial that start-ups trained to treat their ideas as hypotheses and test them made better decisions, including stopping or pivoting earlier. Sarasvathy (2001) adds that expert entrepreneurs often start from the means they control and the loss they can afford, and build the market with early partners rather than predicting it.

This plan puts those ideas into one working document. It runs for 18 months from the first customer interview, because that is about the time a focused team needs to move from an idea to evidence of repeatable sales, and about the time a first small funding round must last. It is organised around five stage gates:

2. Opportunity statement

Shane and Venkataraman (2000) define the field of entrepreneurship as the study of how opportunities to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated and exploited, and by whom. Your opportunity statement records your answer for this venture.

Example: Mallowpine Labs (fictional) targets independent community pharmacies with one to three sites in English- speaking markets. The problem in their words: "We lose money on stock that expires and on stock-outs of fast movers, and the wholesaler's ordering screen does not help." Current alternatives are the wholesaler's ordering portal, spreadsheets and the pharmacy management system's basic reorder points. The solution is demand forecasting and order suggestions as a subscription at USD 350 a month per site. Why now: pharmacy management systems increasingly offer data export and interfaces, and margins on dispensing have tightened. Why us: one founder worked as a pharmacy operations manager, the other built forecasting models in retail. In the first 18 months Mallowpine will not serve chains, hospitals or wholesalers.

3. Founding team, roles and agreements

Wasserman (2012) documents the founders' dilemmas: whether to found alone or with others, how to split equity and roles, and when to give up control for resources. Decide them explicitly and record them in a founders' agreement (startup/founders-agreement-outline) reviewed by a lawyer.

Example: Mallowpine's two founders split equity 50:50, vesting over four years with a one-year cliff, and assign all venture IP to the company at formation. Founder A leads product and data; founder B leads customers, sales and finance. Spending above USD 10,000 needs both.

4. Hypotheses register

5. Customer discovery plan

Customer discovery, as Blank (2013) describes it, means leaving the building to test the business model's hypotheses with customers before building much. The plan below sets the targets; the interview guide and log live in startup/customer-discovery.

Example synthesis at month 3: 20 owner interviews; 14 ranked stock losses among their top three problems (HYP-001 passed); 11 gave a monthly loss estimate above USD 1,000, with a median of USD 1,600 (HYP-002 passed); 16 said they could sign up to USD 500 a month alone (HYP-003 passed). Unexpected finding: 6 owners worried more about stock-outs of fast movers than about expiries, so the MVP measures both.

6. Business model

Example: subscription at USD 350 a month per site; channel through direct sales to owners, a pharmacy association partnership and referrals; gross margin of 80% after hosting, data interfaces and support; key metrics are paid sites, monthly churn, CAC and order-line acceptance.

7. MVP and experiments

For each experiment, write down before it starts what you will do if it passes and what you will do if it fails. Experiments with no decision attached are research, not tests (mba/mba-marketing-experiments-card covers sample size and noise).

8. Unit economics

For a subscription business with monthly price $p$, gross margin $m$, monthly churn $\chi$, monthly discount rate $i$ and customer acquisition cost $CAC$:

Example (Mallowpine, assumptions to be replaced by pilot data):

Read the ratios with care. An LTV-to-CAC ratio near 3 is often quoted as healthy for subscription businesses, but it is a rule of thumb, not a standard, and the discounted figure here is 2.22. A 15-month payback means each new customer consumes cash for over a year, so faster growth increases the cash need (section 9). The two inputs that move the answer most are churn and CAC, which is why HYP-008 and HYP-009 decide gate G4. mba/mba-customer-lifetime-value-card covers cohort-based LTV, and mba/mba-pricing-card covers how to test the price.

9. 18-month operating and cash plan

Example drivers: operating spending (team, tools, hosting, sales and marketing) of USD 45,000 a month in months 1 to 3, 70,000 in months 4 to 6, 110,000 in months 7 to 12 and 150,000 in months 13 to 18; new paid sites 4 a month in months 7 to 9, 8 in months 10 to 12, 14 in months 13 to 15 and 20 in months 16 to 18; churn 2% a month; price USD 350; gross margin 80%. Funding: founders USD 100,000 in month 1, a pre-seed SAFE of USD 1,500,000 closing in month 3 and a seed round of USD 4,000,000 closing in month 15. Paid sites are expected values after churn, so they show one decimal.

Month 7 in Excel: paid sites =B6*(1-2%)+4 = 4.0; revenue =4*350 = 1,400; gross profit =1400*80% = 1,120; net burn =110000-1120 = 108,880; closing cash =1255000-108880 = 1,146,120. Total net burn over 18 months is USD 1,731,861, and monthly recurring revenue reaches USD 44,869 in month 18 (USD 538,428 a year).

Three readings matter more than the totals. First, cash falls to USD 10,000 in month 2: the pre-seed must close on time, or the founders must cut spending or add their own money. Second, without the seed round the company runs out of cash in month 17 (closing cash USD -17,755), so the seed process must start by about month 12, when about six months of cash remain, and the plan needs a fallback (cut spending to the month 7 to 12 level, slow hiring) if the round is late. Third, the plan assumes CAC is covered inside operating spending: 138 new sites at USD 4,200 would cost USD 579,600 of the USD 1,560,000 spent in months 7 to 18 (=138*4200 against =6*110000+6*150000), about 37%, which is plausible for a sales-led product but must be checked against actual spending by channel.

10. Financing plan

In US start-up practice, the post-money SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) published by Y Combinator has been its standard early-stage instrument since 2018, with versions that carry a valuation cap, a discount or a most-favoured-nation clause (checked on https://www.ycombinator.com/documents on 2026-10-30). Other markets use their own instruments and templates, such as advance subscription agreements in the UK or convertible loans in parts of Europe; check what local investors and tax rules expect, with a lawyer.

Example dilution, simplified (no option pool top-up at the seed, SAFE converting at its post-money cap):

The SAFE of USD 1.5 million with a USD 12 million post-money cap buys 12.5% (=1.5/12). A seed round of USD 4 million at a USD 16 million pre-money valuation gives the seed investors 20% (=4/20) and multiplies every earlier holding by 0.8 (=16/20). In practice, investors usually ask for the option pool to be enlarged before the seed, which dilutes the founders further; mba/mba-venture-finance-cap-table-card and mba/mba-vc-method-card show the full mechanics.

11. Legal and administrative set-up

12. Hiring plan

Check that every hire in this table is inside the operating spending of section 9, and that the equity ranges fit the option pool in section 10.

13. Metrics, decision gates and pivot or stop criteria

Pivot or stop criteria (agreed by the founders on YYYY-MM-DD).

14. Risk register

15. Governance and reporting

16. Quality checklist

• The opportunity statement names a segment specific enough to decide who is in or out.
• Every important assumption is a hypothesis with a test, a threshold and a date.
• The riskiest hypotheses are tested first and most cheaply.
• Interview evidence is recorded the same day and counted against thresholds.
• Unit economics use contribution, not revenue, and label each input as measured or assumed.
• The cash plan is built from drivers and shows the month cash runs out without the next round.
• The fundraising process starts with at least six months of cash left.
• Every hire unlocks a milestone and fits the cash plan.
• Stop and pivot criteria were agreed before the evidence came in.
• The founders' agreement, IP assignment and customer terms are in place before the first pilot.
• Every number in the plan matches across sections 8, 9 and 10.

17. Common mistakes

1. Building before discovering. Months of product work before 20 customer conversations is the most common way to spend a pre-seed round on the wrong thing.
2. Asking for opinions instead of evidence. "Would you use this?" invites politeness. Ask what customers did last time the problem occurred and what it cost.
3. Thresholds set after the results. A threshold chosen after the data always passes.
4. Revenue-target planning. A plan that starts from "USD 1 million by month 18" and works backwards hides the drivers that make it true or false.
5. Ignoring the cash trough. Long payback periods mean growth consumes cash; the faster you grow, the more you need.
6. Raising too late. Rounds take months. Starting with three months of cash left gives investors the power.
7. Equal everything. Equal equity and shared decisions on everything feel fair and often fail; agree roles and decision rights explicitly.
8. Hiring ahead of evidence. Each hire raises burn permanently; hire to unlock a milestone that evidence supports.
9. Treating the plan as a pitch. Investors read the plan for judgement: clear assumptions, honest risks and stop criteria build more trust than optimism.
10. Legal set-up as an afterthought. Missing IP assignments and unclear founder equity are found in investor due diligence and delay rounds.

Sources and further reading

Primary works:

• McGrath, R. G., and MacMillan, I. C. (1995). Discovery-driven planning. Harvard Business Review, July-August 1995.
• Shane, S., and Venkataraman, S. (2000). The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 217-226.
• Sarasvathy, S. D. (2001). Causation and effectuation: Toward a theoretical shift from economic inevitability to entrepreneurial contingency. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 243-263.
• Blank, S. (2013). Why the lean start-up changes everything. Harvard Business Review, May 2013.
• Kerr, W. R., Nanda, R., and Rhodes-Kropf, M. (2014). Entrepreneurship as experimentation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(3), 25-48.
• Camuffo, A., Cordova, A., Gambardella, A., and Spina, C. (2020). A scientific approach to entrepreneurial decision making: Evidence from a randomized control trial. Management Science, 66(2), 564-586.

Practice pages (checked 2026-10-30):

• Y Combinator, SAFE financing documents, https://www.ycombinator.com/documents.

Books (further reading, by name only): Wasserman, The Founder's Dilemmas (Princeton University Press, 2012); Ries, The Lean Startup (2011); Blank and Dorf, The Startup Owner's Manual (2012); Maurya, Running Lean; Feld and Mendelson, Venture Deals.

Related templates in this library: mba/mba-entrepreneurship-guide, mba/mba-opportunity-assessment-card, startup/customer-discovery, business/lean-canvas, finance/unit-economics-analysis, mba/mba-venture-finance-cap-table-card, mba/mba-term-sheet-card, mba/mba-business-law-guide.

Revision history

Standard and licence note

Structure aligned with published entrepreneurship research and practice on opportunity recognition (Shane and Venkataraman 2000), effectuation (Sarasvathy 2001), discovery-driven planning (McGrath and MacMillan 1995), experimentation (Kerr, Nanda and Rhodes-Kropf 2014; Camuffo and colleagues 2020) and customer discovery (Blank 2013), with the SAFE reference checked on the Y Combinator documents page on 2026-10-30. The text, the plan structure, the worked example and every number are original; no book, course material or published case is copied or paraphrased, and Mallowpine Labs, its founders and its customers are fictional. The template is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by any accelerator, investor, school or publisher. It is a planning aid, not legal, tax, investment or financial advice: check current rules and terms with qualified advisers before you form a company, raise money or sign contracts. Template licence: MIT.