What makes more sense: writing down a business plan that is limited to what you know, or writing down a business plan that asks the world answers to questions you don’t know? In my opinion the answer is “Both!”.
There are a bunch of questions about the business of Manifold Recording that I really have the data to answer: how much is the lease? How much can I afford to spend on gear? What should I charge as a daily rate? But there are some other questions that I am too biased to answer: what should be the first 10 projects we attempt? What is going to be the most popular use of the studio space? What is the fastest and surest path to self-sustaining profit? Then it struck me: why not use this blog to attempt to inform answers to these and other questions? After all, my biggest risk is not whether somebody will steal my ideas, but whether I will be able to execute them at all!
I’ve created a new tag: +1/-1. The idea is based on the email shorthand of +1 for ideas that people support and -1 for ideas they thing are not so great. If you want to see the questions that are out there, you can search for articles that have this tag, and you can add your +1 or -1 comments as you see fit. Over time, I hope that this develops into a “wisdom of crowds” that can help me make the right choices in an unknowably large range of possibilities. We’ll see!