High schoolers built a business plan in a single day

Ran a workshop at a high school where students built a business plan in a single day

The other day, I ran a workshop at a high school where the task was to build a business plan in a single day.

Even limited to just the bare bones of a business plan, asking high schoolers to do it in a single day is fundamentally unreasonable.

The workshop took place at a high school in Tokyo. The time available was one day. The students worked hands-on that same day and submitted their plans straight to a business plan competition.

I decided the theme. I was told “anything related to startups is fine,” so rather than carve out one piece halfway, I decided to run through the whole thing. All the steps, in one day. I knew from the start it was unreasonable.

One day, one business plan the width of the band is how many ideas were still alive

01 Pains Write down what actually bothers you

02 Map Put each one on two axes

03 Cut Throw most of them away

04 Shape Customers, price, plan

05 Pitch Say it out loud

one

Problems came out in three stages

The first thing we did that morning was write problems on sticky notes.

I split this into three stages: what bothers you personally, what bothers someone close to you whom you can name, and a problem facing society. Everyone had to write all three, without exception.

What came out was all over the place. Some were big things like anxiety about the future, others were small things tied closely to a family’s daily life. About half didn’t look like they could become a business. That’s fine.

Deciding where to stick the note starts an argument on its own

I drew two axes on the whiteboard. Vertical for the size of the pain, horizontal for the number of people affected. Each person decided for themselves where to stick their note.

Value = Pain × People every note somebody wrote, placed by how much it hurts and how many it hurts

Pain People affected

worth arguing about

Once you actually do this, you find that the real work isn’t “sticking the note” — it’s the group checking each other. Is that really that painful? About how many people? Everyone verifies together. Sometimes the person who wrote the note lowers its position themselves.

The horizontal axis needs a number of people behind it, so I explained how to estimate market size at this point, and had the students work through it by hand. Start from population, multiply and divide by conditions, then multiply by unit price at the end. The numbers can move however much you like, and whatever assumptions you set become the width of the answer. Doing it once with your own hands changes how it feels.

You can talk about value without ever using the word “value.” I came up through the ranks — I don’t have an MBA or anything like it. I’ve started up startups several times, and I’ve also launched new businesses and planned new products on the corporate side. I learned this whole framework on the ground. I still am.

Narrowing to one

After lunch we moved into narrowing down. Circle it, box it, cross it out. Put an X over the boxed one too. This is the point where the whiteboard gets messiest.

In the end we talked it through with the students and settled on one. With only a day, there was no way around it. Ideally you’d want to run several in parallel and compare them.

From there the vocabulary on the board changes. Target customers, sales method, pricing plan. Who to sell to, at what price, how much to open up for free.

Drawing the line between free and paid was hard work. It’s genuinely difficult even for adults. It’s the kind of thing you should spend time reconsidering over and over, and that’s exactly what happened.

We also went into pretty concrete territory on product composition and features. What technology to use. Which sensor, which module, which maker’s which product. Since these were students from an information science course, we didn’t hold back — we put actual part numbers on the table.

This was the part that came easily to me. Engineering, business planning, and actual management are all continuous ground for me, so a choice of technology flows directly into cost and pricing. Put the other way: if one person isn’t holding that connection together, a business plan turns abstract somewhere along the way.

Note: the photos have been processed with image generation so that no location or individual can be identified. The fine detail on the whiteboard has been made unreadable on purpose.

What we managed, and what we didn’t

It was unreasonable, but the main goal was achieved. I managed to hand over, in full, the essence of what’s needed to build a business plan.

What we accomplished: clarifying the pain, estimating customer scale, working out the composition and features, setting a pricing plan, and laying the groundwork for drawing up a business plan. Getting this far in one day is pretty good.

What we didn’t accomplish: actually drawing up the business plan. Customer interviews. We couldn’t touch either of these at all.

My voice went hoarse.

“I felt like I was completely hopeless”

When I asked for their impressions at the end, one participant said this.

We came up with a ton of ideas, but as we worked through them, one after another got scrapped, and I felt like I was completely hopeless.

So I told them the story of 1 win, 19 losses.

1 win, 19 losses the losing squares are not the failure. stopping at nineteen is.

5%

Roughly the five-year survival rate of venture-backed startups. Calculated from data that is now old. No one has reported the trend moving.

The five-year survival rate for venture-funded startups is said to be around 5%. One in twenty. The data I used for the calculation is quite old, but I haven’t heard that this trend has changed much.

In other words, someone with 1 win and 19 losses is, in this world, decisively a winner. If you examined 19 ideas in half a day and scrapped all 19 yourself, that means you carried out the hardest task of the day, start to finish.

When I talk with students, I make a point of sharing my own story too.

I’ve taken on all kinds of challenges in Japan and the US. I haven’t yet reached what people would call ordinary “success.” But I haven’t lost 19 times either. Which means it’s far too early for me to say anything that sounds enlightened. So there’s nothing to do but keep challenging myself without wasting time.

I’m still partway through too. I want everyone else to keep going the same way.

This piece was drafted and directed by Yuichiro Kuzuryu, with the writing done by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/09/1789/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.