Free business plan templates
Cloud-based business plan templates are available in Aha! as part of your 30-day free trial.
Business plans are important tools to help develop and refine your strategic thinking. And a well-defined business plan makes it easier to explore your assumptions and share your strategy with your broader team. As former product managers, our team at Aha! relied on many types of business planning templates in the past.
We used these to help define our marketing strategy, to better understand our buyers, and to analyze the market and competition. One common challenge that business and product builders face is choosing the right template to use. We wish there had been more pre-built business plan templates to download for quick use.
Building a business plan is a common first step to organize your thinking. From startups to enterprise teams, business plans are a useful tool for deeply considering your business and product assumptions and what will make your product or service a success.
Different situations call for different types of business plans. If you are developing a new product you need to define key elements of your offering. If you are in an established business it might simply be a good way to summarize the strategy that is driving a new market opportunity. Ultimately, the content of your business plan is determined by your goals and audience.
No matter how you choose to present your business plan, remember that the most successful products and services are built with a clear strategy that the team understands. By setting the right plan and making it easily accessible, you align the company so everyone moves in the same direction to make the biggest impact.
These carefully selected and crafted templates allow you to analyze a variety of business and market factors in a single view.
Business model canvas
Use the business model canvas to represent the foundational elements of your product or service. It is a perfect way to articulate, develop, and improve your business model — all on a single page. It also helps you capture key components, such as messaging, customer challenges, and growth opportunities.
Lean canvas
A lean canvas is similar to the business model canvas and presents most of the same information just in a slightly different way. It takes a problem-focused approach and was designed with entrepreneurs and startups in mind. This means that it is a great way to build an actionable business template that helps you deconstruct an idea into its key assumptions.
Porter's 5 forces
Use Porter's 5 forces template to analyze your market and competitive landscape. This model is a great way to outline what alternative solutions your customers have in solving their problems. That means that it is also useful for evaluating the leverage your buyers and partners have in the market.
SWOT template
SWOT is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It is the perfect analysis framework for identifying what your product or service is doing well and where it can improve. It can also be used to explore how well your company is positioned. SWOT models are useful for outlining how your product fits into the competitive landscape and can help you uncover additional go-to-market opportunities. For more SWOT templates, visit our free SWOT Analysis Templates page.
Simple matrix Excel template
The basic SWOT matrix template is a four-quadrant table that includes strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in a color-coded grid.
10Ps marketing matrix
Use the 10Ps marketing matrix to identify the key marketing attributes needed for product success. This matrix is perfect for considering the best approach to bringing your product to market and how you will promote it over its lifecycle. What will you charge? How will you promote it? And how will customers actually buy it? These are key questions that any product or marketing professional should answer and this template will help you do so.
Segment profile
The segment profile is ideal for helping to better define a set of customers and the market value of serving them. It is useful for describing the characteristics of a group of similar people and better understanding their challenges and needs. Create multiple segment profiles to intelligently consider different customer personas and which groups you are in the best position to serve well.
These free templates are a great starting point to build out a business plan. You can download these lightweight Excel and PowerPoint templates and customize them to your needs. Eventually, we recommend bringing your business plans into Aha! Roadmaps, so that you can collaborate with your team in real time — integrating all of your strategic planning, idea management, feature prioritization, and roadmapping in one place.
Plan today what you will achieve tomorrow. Aha! Roadmaps can help.
