How to Tell If a Business Plan Is Fundable

I founded Flashline in 2001 and wrote the plans that raised the money to build it; it was ultimately acquired by Oracle in 2008. I've read a lot of other people's plans since, as a founder of a startup accelerator, and as an investor. The gap between a plan that gets funded and one that doesn't is rarely the idea. It's almost always the evidence.

Here's the method I use when I read one. It isn't a formula, and the number it produces matters less than the discipline of producing it.

Score the evidence, not the idea

The first mistake most founders make, and most readers let them make it, is to grade the vision. A plan describes a large market, a clever product, and a big number at the end, and the reader nods along. But a plan is a set of claims, and for each claim only one question matters: what's the evidence?

So I score the evidence, not the assertion. "Customers love this" is a 2 if it's a sentence and a 4 if it's a retention curve. The rule I hold myself to is the one founders resist most: absence of evidence is a low score, not a neutral one. A missing section is a signal, not a blank you fill in charitably. If the plan never says how the company makes money, that isn't "to be determined." That's a minus one.

This sounds harsh. It's a kindness, because it tells the founder exactly where to spend the next month.

Five ways a plan is dead before the scorecard runs

I score eight dimensions and weight them, but the weighting is the least interesting part of the method. Before any of it runs, I check for five flaws that cap the verdict no matter how strong the rest looks. A great deck can't outscore a fatal flaw.

The first is no demand signal: conviction with nothing behind it, no user, no pilot, no waitlist that converts. The second is numbers that don't reconcile, where the market size, the projections, and the unit economics fail to support each other. The third is an uninvestable structure, a sound small business presented as a venture-scale one with no path to the return the ask implies. The fourth is a team that can't build or sell what it describes and has no plan to close the gap. The fifth is dishonesty, including the conspicuous omission, the missing slide that happens to be the weakest one.

Any one of these caps a plan at borderline. Two results in a "No". I name the gate and the evidence every time, because a founder deserves to know which wall they hit.

What counts depends on your stage

The same plan should be graded differently depending on how much money it asks for. This is the part most generic feedback gets wrong.

At pre-seed there's barely any traction to judge, so weighting it heavily is a category error. The bet at that stage is the team and the opportunity: who is building this, and is the problem real and urgent. By Series A the calculus inverts, and traction and unit economics become the proof the reader expects; "great team, early days" stops being enough. I use the size of the ask as a rough proxy for stage. It's crude, but it's always in the document, and it stops me holding a pre-seed founder to a Series A standard.

Current view, subject to change

I'll label this as opinion. I think the evidence-first lens is right at every stage, and I'd be slow to give it up. The weights, though, are a hypothesis, not a law. We're building this rubric into a managed AI agent that evaluates plans, and the reason we run real plans through it is to compare its verdict with the investor's own decision. When the agent and the investor disagree, that disagreement is the most useful thing we learn, because it shows where the weights are wrong. If a season of that data says I'm systematically over-weighting one dimension, I'll change it. That would change my mind.

Final thoughts

A business plan isn't a story you tell well. It's a set of claims you can or can't back. A founder doesn't need my verdict so much as my list: claim by claim, where the evidence is thin. That's the part they can go fix.

If you're writing one now, read your own plan this way. Find every sentence that asserts something a stranger wouldn't believe, and ask what you'd have to show to make them believe it. The plan that survives that pass is the one worth sending.

Best regards,
Charles Stack
Founder, Coworkers.Global