AI has created millions of new business opportunities and made it easier than ever before to launch a new business. If you have a business idea and are looking to put together a business plan, you can also use AI tools to help validate your idea and present it to investors or partners.
Whether you're a repeat entrepreneur or just thinking about your first business idea, thinking through your business plan can be an important step for getting your business off the ground.
In this guide, we'll review the primary components of a business plan, what an AI business plan generator is, the top features to look for, and our top picks for the best AI business plan generators.
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What is a business plan?
A business plan is a strategic document that provides an overview of a business's goals and its strategy for achieving them. Typically, a business plan will include items like:
- Description of the business and product
- Analysis of the competitive landscape
- Product, marketing, and sales strategy
- KPIs and financial projections
Two of the primary reasons that entrepreneurs and executives create business plans are (1) to plan out key business decisions and strategy before spending time on execution and (2) to share their business ideas with partners who may want to invest or work together with the business.
A well-crafted business plan should serve as a roadmap for a business's growth and help entrepreneurs make good decisions and allocate resources effectively.
What is an AI business plan generator?
An AI business plan generator is a software tool that uses AI to create a customized business plan for your specific needs. Typically, an AI business plan generator will ask you key information about your business like industry, target market, and financial goals, and then the AI generator can analyze the information and produce a well-structured business plan. This can save you time and effort while ensuring that your plan is tailored to your unique business.
Top features to look for in an AI business plan generator
Here are some features that you should look for in an AI business plan generator:
- Fast and user-friendly interface: A good AI business plan generator should be easy to use, with an intuitive interface to guide you through the process of creating your plan. Typically this will be in the form of a chat or app interface.
- "Copilot" customizability: We all know AI is rarely perfect, especially when creating important documents like a business plan. It can often involve several back-and-forth revisions with the AI before you land on something you like. Look for a tool that acts as a "copilot" and can add or remove sections and tailor language to match your brand voice, rather than a product that promises you a 100% completed product that it will not be able to deliver on.
- Collaboration features: If you're working with a team or partners, choose an AI business plan generator that allow you to share the business plan with others and collaborate on revisions. You don't want to write your business plan in a vacuum, but if you use a proprietary AI tool that no one else has access to, it can be difficult to collaborate with others.
- Export options: Make sure that your AI business plan generator allows you to create and export your business plan in the format that you want, such as a slide deck, PDF, Word, or Google Doc. Some AI business plan generators will be focused on text documents, while others will just describe your business plan in a series of chat messages, and others, like Plus AI, will give you a presentation that you can share with colleagues and partners.
How do I use an AI business plan generator?
Using an AI business plan generator should be easy. Here's how to get started!
- Pick an AI business plan generator from our list.
- Provide as much information about your business as you'd like to help the AI understand your business and tailor the business plan accordingly.
- Ask the AI for the first draft of your business plan.
- Review the AI-generated plan and make any necessary revisions.
- Share the plan with coworkers and partners to gather feedback and continue making revisions.
The important thing to remember in this process is that an AI tool is unlikely to understand your business as well as you do. Make sure you spend time validating the accuracy of the AI business plan and whether it is capturing the right story behind your business.
Example prompt for AI business plan generator
Here are some of the key pieces of information to share with an AI business plan generator, as well as how you might string them together in a few example prompts:
- Overview of the business (history, founding story, number of employees, growth, notable facts)
- Key product(s) and unique selling proposition
- Key sales and marketing channels
- Proposed strategy for product, sales, and/or marketing
- Market landscape and comparison to competitors
- Goals, KPIs, and financial projections
- Key milestones to-date (e.g., revenue, key customers, product breakthroughs)
- Target audience and customer segments
- Management team and other key personnel
- Risks and challenges
- Opportunities and new investment areas
- Funding needs and use of funds
- Exit strategy
Example prompt to create a business plan
Create a business plan for Dan's Desserts, a direct-to-consumer cookies and candy company that will be launched in Q3 of 2023. Dan's Desserts sells sweets via a website and app-based delivery services, and the unique strategy of Dan's Desserts is to leverage TikTok and other short-form video platforms for marketing its products. It aims to reach $1M in sales by the end of the year.
Best AI business plan generators
There are dozens of different AI tools that can help you write a business plan. Here are 10 of the best options we've found in our research.
- ChatGPT and Custom GPTs
Link: https://chat.openai.com/
ChatGPT is the most well-known AI tool in the market today, and it is capable of generating business plans and helping users think through their business ideas in a back-and-forth chat interface. Just provide it with a prompt like the example above, and it will get started immediately.
To go a step further, you can use a Custom GPT like the Plus AI business plan generator, which will help prompt you for more information to further refine your business plan, give you more ideas and tips as you co-create your business plan, and output your business plan in a consistent format.
The primary challenge with using ChatGPT to create your business plan is that it does not naturally export its chats into other productivity tools, which limits your range of outputs formats and collaboration options. If you are going to be presenting or sharing your business plan with others, you will probably need to use another tool to take the raw ChatGPT output and turn it into something else.
For example, to turn your ChatGPT business plan into a slide deck, you will need to use a tool like Plus AI to convert your ChatGPT output into a presentation. To turn your ChatGPT output into a Google Doc, you can probably just copy and paste it directly into Google Docs.
2. Plus AI
Link: https://www.plusdocs.com/
While the old-school mental image of a "business plan" is a thick stack of pages of single-spaced text, most modern startups and companies use a slide deck for their business plans. Slides make it easier to read, easier to share, and easier to highlight the key aspects of your businesses that differentiate it from others.
Plus AI is an AI tool that specializes in making well-designed, professional presentations, which makes it the perfect tool for business plans. After giving Plus a brief about your business, it will give you the outline of a business plan (which you can edit and rearrange), and then it will generate the first draft of your business plan.
Once the presentation has been generated, you can create and apply a custom theme, add or remove slides, and rewrite or reformat slides as you see fit. It's an end-to-end tool to help you create the perfect presentation. Some of the other key benefits of Plus AI are:
- It works directly in Google Slides, so you get all of the built-in editing and collaboration features
- It allows you to edit, revise, and theme your slides after you create a first draft of a presentation
- You can use Plus AI to insert one slide at a time, or an entire presentation
- It's free to try it out!
3. Notion AI
Link: https://www.notion.so/
If you are interested in productivity and startups, you've probably heard of Notion. Notion is an all-in-one workspace app that allows users to organize all of their notes, tasks, and references in one place.
The primary user interface for Notion is a document editor, and there are multiple ways to use Notion AI within the Notion editor. You can give it a freeform prompt like "Create a business plan for..." and have it generate a full document, or you can create section headers or an outline, and then use Notion AI to write each section individually.
One of the best parts of using a "native" AI tool like Notion AI is the output comes out looking beautifully formatted as it is written using Notion's native blocks, and it's fun and easy to write and edit content in Notion. The downside of using an app like Notion is if you later have to copy and paste it into Google Docs or Word, the formatting can get lost or mis-translated.
If you are working on launching a new business and you already have many notes and ideas written across various Notion pages, creating a business plan in Notion could be a great idea. It also makes it easier to collaborate and continue to refine a plan since it keeps everything and everyone in one place.
4. Coda
Link: https://coda.io/
Coda is a similar product to Notion, and it was one of the earliest tools to deeply embed AI into its product workflows. Coda has an AI interface that will allow you to generate entire docs from a prompt, or the ability to write individual sections or an outline of a document.
Just like Notion, Coda will create outputs in the native format of a Coda doc, which is great for collaboration, but might not be as conducive to outputting into other formats for sharing with partners or investors.
One thing we found in testing Coda, is that will create AI content using tables, which can be helpful for presenting time-series data or other numerical data, and it seems like the other AI tools are not as good at creating non-text information.
If you are considering Coda vs. Notion, check out our comparison of the two products here, and go with the one that you think is a better match for your business.
5. Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is one of the older AI tools on the market, and it is specifically intended for building slide decks. If you are looking for a product that can help design slides to show off a business plan, it might be a good fit.
There are two ways you can use Beautiful.ai. The first is to use their AI "Designer Bot" which will take a free-form AI instruction to create a presentation. The second way is to use their AI slide designer, which will walk you through a handful of steps to pick and design a slide.
Beautiful.AI leans heavily on their templating and theming engine to create aesthetic slides, so it is a good tool to use with a team to make sure your slides are consistent. However, because it is a standalone presentation tool, you will need to export your content in order to share it as a doc or slide deck with someone who uses Google Workspace or Microsoft Office, and the formatting may get mis-translated during the export process.
6. Jasper AI
Jasper AI is one of the most well-known AI writing tools in the market today. While it is primarily focused on marketing teams, it is also very useful for general business writing, and you can use it to write business plans as well.
Because JasperAI has been optimized for writing, it will generally have higher quality writing and more functionality like the ability to select a custom writing voice, use different ML models, and quickly transform content.
Because the tool is relatively expensive (but offers a free trial), you may want to try it out for your business plan, see if you can use it for other use cases as well, and then make a decision on whether it is worth considering.
7. Type AI
TypeAI is an AI document editor, specifically focused on writers. Its main focus is providing a UI and set of workflows that makes it easy for writers to quickly create high-quality content.
Some of the best features in TypeAI are the suggestions for what to write about next and the chat function that can allow you to ask questions like "What are some of the key risks I should consider for my business?" When using Type to create a business plan, these features are helpful ways to find what to add to your plan or find areas of your plan that need additional explanation.
TypeAI offers a free trial, so you can try it out for writing your business plan and then see if you find value in using it for writing other types of documents and materials as well.
8. 15MinutePlan.ai
15MinutePlan is a simple website that focuses only on generating text-based business plans. Their site will walk you through a 7-step questionnaire about your business and then create a business plan document after the last step.
There is no need to login or pay for the plan at this phase, but if you'd like to edit the plan or get premium features (like the ability to use AI to ask questions about the plan), you will be asked to pay.
The general quality of the writing and output seem similar or lower than tools like Coda AI or Notion AI, but because it asks detailed questions about your business, the content can sometimes be better than the other AI tools.
Our advice would be to try a tool like 15MinutePlan and see if it gives you what you need, but more importantly, save the answers you provide to their questionnaire and then use the same inputs for the other AI tools to get higher quality outputs everywhere.
9. VentureKit
VentureKit is another streamlined website that focuses only on generating business plans. Their site will ask you a couple of questions and then create a long business plan with different sections. The overview sections are free, but the more detailed sections on implementation plans and competitor analysis require you to pay.
The nice part of the Venture Kit package is that it shows you a detailed outline of all of the potential sections of a business plan, and it is presented in a way that makes it more visually appealing than a standard text document.
However, at the end of the day, if you need to convert this into a Google Doc or a presentation, it is still a long set of different text blocks that you will either need to copy and paste or transform into a different format.
We'd recommend taking a look at the different sections they present in their business plan outline and then figuring out if you need any or all of them before you upgrade to a premium plan. It could also be that some of those pieces of the outline could help you better clarify what you need in your business plan to the other AI tools.
10. Grammarly
Grammarly has a simple webpage that asks you a series of questions before generating a "one-pager" business plan. This is not a particularly sophisticated AI generator, but the simple interface and simple output make it easy to quickly think through a new idea without a lot of setup work.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I use ChatGPT to create a business plan? Yes. You can use ChatGPT to generate a whole business plan or sections of your business plan. If you would like to convert your business plan into a presentation, you may also consider a tool like Plus AI.
- Can I trust the accuracy of an AI business plan? Sort of. While AI-generated business plans are a great way to get a head-start on the first draft of your business plan, it's essential to review and verify the accuracy of the plan and tailor it to your business before sharing with partners.
- Can I use an AI business plan for any type of business? Yes, you can use AI to generate a business plan for any type of business, although the AI may be better for 'mainstream' businesses like a coffee shop than for a nuclear power startup.
- How can I customize an AI business plan for my business? After you get a first draft of your business plan, make sure the AI tool you use allows you to revise and edit the output. A tool like Plus AI, for example, lives directly in Google Slides, which makes it easy to collaborate on customizing your plan for your business.
Conclusion
Using AI to create a business plan can save you a lot of time and effort when you are trying to launch your business. Of course, AI is not always one-size-fits-all, so finding the right tool to support you and your business is not always straightforward. Hopefully this guide allows you to get started on your business plan and find some tools that can assist you with other tasks as well.
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