LivePlan Just Got a Whole Lot Smarter

Over the past year, we’ve been thinking hard about what entrepreneurs actually need when they sit down to plan a business. Not just “how do I write a business plan?” The real questions are usually bigger than that.

• How do I know if this idea is worth pursuing?
• How do I research the market without disappearing into 47 browser tabs?
• How do I build a plan that actually holds up to funders' questions?
• How do I turn that plan into a pitch deck?
• And how do I do all of that without starting over every time I move to the next step?

That’s exactly what we’ve been building.

LivePlan is no longer just a place to write a business plan. It’s a connected system that helps you move from idea to research to plan to review to pitch — with each step building on the last, instead of forcing you to recreate the work in a new tool. And if you do work in one area that changes your plan, you can update your work throughout LivePlan with a single click.

Here’s what’s new.

Idea Canvas helps you validate whether your idea is worth building in the first place. Instead of staring at a blank canvas or trusting a generic AI opinion, you can work through your business model with guided AI, real research, risk scoring, evidence strength, and suggested pivots before you commit. It is designed to help you find the weak spots early and strengthen the idea before you invest more time or money.

Market Research gives you in-depth reports on market size, customer profiles, competition, and industry benchmarks — built into LivePlan. Instead of hunting for data across endless tabs or guessing your way through the market section, you can get research tailored to your industry and geography, with data you can actually use to shape your plan, pricing, market positioning, and financial assumptions. The Market Research includes TAM/SAM/SOM, demographics or firmographics, customer personas, trends, behaviors, and competitor analysis. And best of all, the research is checked for accuracy across more than 50 validated sources. Nothing hallucinated, everything based on facts. 

Our new plan experience is a complete rebuild of the business plan itself. The new Plan Document Creator combines professional document design, real-time collaboration, and AI grounded in your actual business facts, so the finished plan looks polished and professional. Your plan will hold up when lenders and investors start asking questions. And if you re looking for an SBA loan, LivePlan uses and SBA approved format. 

And one of the most useful parts of that new experience is this: you can import any business plan from any other system.

If you already have a plan in Google Docs, Word, ChatGPT, another AI tool, or just a messy set of notes, you do not have to start over. LivePlan can import what you already have, map it into the right sections, and turn it into something you can actually work on inside the platform. From there, you can improve it, connect it to your financials, refine it with AI that remembers your business, and use the rest of LivePlan’s tools instead of being stuck in a static document. LivePlan picks up where you left off, providing guidance, advice, and a system grounded in decades of experience building fundable plans. 

Plan Review gives you a lender-style read on whether your plan is actually ready before you submit it. It assesses each major section, flags issues, and generates the specific questions a funder is likely to ask based on what is actually in your plan. 

And when you are ready to present, Pitch Deck turns your plan into an investor-ready deck with an expert-curated slide structure, full editing tools, and live-linked financials. That means your value proposition, market opportunity, competitive advantages, and financial projections can flow directly from the work you’ve already done — and when the forecast changes, the charts in the deck update too.  LivePlan even creates professional images based on your business for a polished look.

And as we launch new features, we want you to know that we are not launching disconnected AI features just to say we have AI. We are building a system where each part of the work connects: validate the idea, research the market, build the plan, review it as a lender would, and turn it into a pitch without having to start from scratch.  That’s what I’m excited about.

Because entrepreneurs do not need more random tools. They need a better way to move from “I have an idea” to “I have something real I can defend” to “my plan is funded!”

And that’s exactly where LivePlan is headed.