I've started multiple businesses in my life (with another on the way), and there's one core lesson that keeps slapping me in the face every single time:

"A battle plan never survives contact with the enemy."

So rather than obsess over planning, I decide on the core principles that will guide the business, and then start fast, stay agile, and adapt along the way. Sometimes, we've ventured down paths that were completely unknown to us when we started, and we could never have planned for. Those unknown unknowns only reveal themselves on the journey.

Building a business is like walking down a dark path with a torch, only able to see a few yards ahead. Sometimes, there will be a sudden obstacle you need to climb. Other times, a new path will emerge with much nicer terrain. 

You can't see what's coming, and that's exactly why your initial business plan doesn't matter nearly as much as most founders think. In fact, taking too long planning, or then clinging to it (because you spent so much time on the plan) might be the very thing that kills your startup.

Entrepreneurs are problem solvers, not prophets. And in this essay, I’m giving my thoughts on an alternate path to follow.

Why Initial Plans Almost Always Fail

When you start a business, there are too many unknown variables to be able to predict the future, and build a plan that you can see through from start to finish. But then, when you add an industry as complex, competitive, and ever-changing as iGaming into the mix, detailed plans become futile. 

But the problem goes deeper than just market unpredictability. Founders, especially first-timers, fall in love with their initial vision. It's a cognitive bias I've seen repeatedly - we get emotionally attached to our first idea because it's ours. We've envisioned it, sold it to investors, and maybe even built a team around it. Our egos become entangled with that original plan.

This attachment is dangerous. When market realities suggest a pivot, many founders resist. They tweak around the edges instead of making fundamental changes. They convince themselves that minor adjustments will fix major problems. They see what they want to see, not what's actually happening.

I've been there. It's painful to admit your original vision might be wrong. And your ego may take a battering when you go to investors and say, “hey, I got this wrong”. But speaking with my investor hat on, I don’t expect people to read the future, and I don’t judge them for a second if they get something wrong. I do judge them if they foolishly stick to a plan that’s now working, though. 

The Virtue of Starting Anyway

Here's the strange paradox: you need a plan to get started, even though it will almost certainly change. The initial plan isn't valuable because it's right, it's valuable because it gets you moving.

Think of it like this: you can theorise all day about how players will behave, what features they'll value, or how to convert or retain them. But that's just mental masturbation until you get something into the market. Only then will you get the real data that matters.

"Getting in the game" creates feedback loops you simply cannot access any other way. When Bet365 started, they were focused on retail betting shops before they saw the potential of online. 

Your customers are the ultimate business plan editors. They don't care about your PowerPoint slides or financial projections. They care about whether your product solves a problem for them. And they'll tell you - through their actions, not their words - what works and what doesn't.

I see too many founders who never launch because they're waiting for the "perfect" product. Meanwhile, their competitors are out there, getting real feedback, iterating rapidly, and finding product-market fit through experience rather than theoretical planning.

Practical Approach to Planning in Uncertainty

So what's the solution? It’s a "Minimum Viable Plan" framework for iGaming startups. It's about distinguishing between what you must know now versus what you can figure out later.

Your MVP should focus on just a few core elements:

1. A clear vision of the problem you're solving (not necessarily the exact solution)

2. Your unfair advantage (what makes you uniquely positioned to win)

3. Initial target market (knowing this will likely expand or shift)

4. Unit economics that could work (not a 5-year forecast nobody believes)

5. First 90-day action plan (after that, it's likely to change anyway)

Everything else should be treated as a hypothesis to be tested, not gospel to be followed. Your tech stack, acquisition channels, feature roadmap, expansion timeline, these can and should evolve based on what you learn.

Structure your team for adaptability, not efficiency. In early stages, you need versatile people who can switch directions quickly. Specialists come later. I'd rather have three generalists who can tackle any problem than five specialists who excel at tasks that might become irrelevant.

Build in formal checkpoints every 4-6 weeks to assess and potentially pivot. Ask: What's working? What's not? What have we learned? What surprised us? To be clear, these aren’t casual conversations. They’re structured reviews where everything should be on the table.

The trickiest part is balancing conviction with flexibility. You need enough conviction to power through inevitable challenges but enough flexibility to recognise when the data is telling you to change course. When in doubt, listen to the data, not your ego.

Finding Product-Market Fit in iGaming

How do you know when you've found product-market fit in iGaming? It's not subtle. Your metrics start to scream at you. Players are registering, but then returning daily. Your acquisition cost plummets because word of mouth kicks in. Support tickets shift from "this doesn't work" to "can you add this feature?" You're no longer pushing a boulder uphill; the market starts pulling you forward.

During the search phase, focus on a handful of metrics that actually matter:

• Retention: Are players coming back after 1 day? 7 days? 30 days?

• Time spent: Are they engaging deeply or just passing through?

• Deposit frequency: How often are they refunding their accounts?

• Net Promoter Score: Would they recommend you to others?

• Organic growth: Is your customer acquisition becoming easier?

Everything else is a vanity metric at this stage.

Speed of iteration is your competitive advantage. The companies that win are the ones that can push updates fastest. If it takes you months to implement features your competitors can ship in weeks, you're dead before you start.

When to double down versus pivot? Double down when your core metrics improve with each iteration, even if absolute numbers are still small. Pivot when multiple iterations yield no improvement in key metrics, despite having enough data to judge.

The mindset shift that separates successful founders from failed ones is giving up the myth of the visionary who sees the future perfectly. Instead, think of yourself as a scientist running experiments. Your job isn't to be right initially; it's to get to right as quickly as possible through rapid testing and adaptation.

Your first idea probably won't work. Your tenth might. Your job is to get through those first nine as efficiently as possible.

Conclusion

Let me wrap this up with what I’ll creatively (or not) call the "Dark Path" framework:

1. Start with a torch, not a map (core principles over detailed plans)

2. Move fast, even with limited visibility (action creates data)

3. Adapt to obstacles rather than forcing your way through them

4. New paths reveal themselves only after you're on the journey

Looking back at my own ventures, from building Blask to helping grow Already Media, the biggest breakthroughs came from pivots we couldn't have anticipated. The original vision was just the entry ticket to a much more interesting game.

The most valuable skill I've developed is becoming comfortable with uncertainty. So get comfortable in the darkness. Embrace the fact that you can only see a few yards ahead. 

Because remember: the battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy. But that's exactly where the real opportunity begins.