You made it to the end! Nice job!
In a nutshell, you now know the basics of what you need to do to get your company up and running. Now that you have read through the process, it is time to go back through the questions and start working on your answers. With those answers, start making decisions. With those decisions, put together your business plan.
You do not necessarily need to go through the questions in the order presented. In the process of fleshing out a business plan, you will inevitably hit road blocks and have to review your answers. Over the next few weeks, months, or years, you will change your mind and revise your answers. In the process of researching the market, both before and after you launch, you will discover new questions whose answers will change how you answer other questions.
The important task at hand is to create a first-draft set of answers to the questions.
It is also important to realize that the plan you create today will be obsolete in a day or a week or a month. Periodically, you will need to go back to review and revise your plan. This includes revising your market analysis, your competitive analysis, your pricing, your hiring plan, marketing plan, sales plan, and financial plan. In short, everything listed in this book will need to be revisited as you get more information, including the answer to question #1 (revised to: Do you still want to start a company?).
With the basic process complete, the other books in The Next Step series provide more detailed guides to these topics. In total, this may look quite daunting, but if you tackle a little bit at a time, a few questions every day, you will get through it all. With that, the next step is to execute that plan and feel the satisfaction of seeing your vision realized in the market.
