When Elon Musk has a brand new start-up concept, he sometimes skips a vital stage of getting the enterprise off the bottom: He would not create a marketing strategy.

Over the final 20 years, Musk has helped construct a slew of profitable corporations, from PayPal to Tesla and SpaceX — making him the world’s richest particular person, with a web price of $258 billion, in line with Bloomberg. And he is accomplished that whereas going immediately in opposition to the grain of standard entrepreneurship knowledge.

Musk admitted to throwing out the thought of creating a written roadmap that sometimes defines an organization’s goals and targets on the South by Southwest convention in 2018. “I had a business plan way back in the Zip2 days,” he stated. “But these things are always wrong, so I just didn’t bother with business plans after that.”

Zip2 was Musk’s first main start-up: He co-founded the corporate, which helped newspapers design metropolis guides, together with his brother Kimbal in 1995. It wasn’t precisely a failure — after 4 years, the brothers offered Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in money.

But these 4 years satisfied Musk that issues hardly ever go in line with plan within the start-up world. So, forward of launching his subsequent firm, X.com — which ultimately merged with a competitor, Confinity, to change into PayPal — Musk resolved to scrap the plan fully.

Musk and his companions would go on to promote PayPal to eBay in 2002, in a $1.5 billion inventory deal.

Many distinguished specialists and start-up icons disagree with Musk’s technique: Not making a marketing strategy is usually cited as one of the vital frequent errors an entrepreneur could make, particularly for anybody making an attempt to lift cash.

Mark Cuban, a fellow billionaire, says he believes in enterprise plans — typically conducting in depth analysis earlier than launching or investing in a enterprise. For him, the bottom line is to go away it “open for change,” so you may adapt when your unique plan begins to go awry.

Richard Branson, one other billionaire, is also called an enormous proponent of writing down his enterprise plans. “A business plan doesn’t have to be a lengthy, well-thought-out proposal,” Branson as soon as wrote in a weblog put up. “it can be as simple as some notes in a notebook, or a scribble on the back of an envelope.”

Branson added that you simply should not want to attend to have a proper, perfected plan to get began — an concept additionally championed by different billionaire entrepreneurs like Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, as CNBC Make It famous in 2017.

Instead of writing a marketing strategy, Musk stated, aspiring entrepreneurs ought to ask themselves some easy questions earlier than getting began. “You really have to ask whether something is true or not,” he stated, and whether or not your corporation concept legitimately “makes sense.”

“If it ever feels like it’s too easy, it probably is,” Musk added.

Musk didn’t instantly reply to CNBC Make It’s request for remark.

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