About Us
About Startup.Ready.
Most early-stage founders are working hard. Few are clear on whether that effort is aimed in the right direction.
Startup.Ready. exists to change that.
What We Do
Startup.Ready. is a structured readiness assessment platform that scores early-stage startups across six foundational pillars and uses AI to identify where assumptions are weak, unclear, or untested.
It takes about 20 minutes. Founders get an honest breakdown of where they stand across Founder, Problem, Market, Business Model, Go-to-Market, and Financial before they commit serious time and money to the wrong direction.
Not encouragement. Clarity.
Mission & Vision
Our Mission is to make structured startup thinking accessible to every early-stage founder — regardless of background, network, or access to resources.
Our Vision is to create a world where every entrepreneur has the structure, clarity, and support they need to bring their ideas to life.
Our Founder
Dr. Shaun P. Digan, MBA, PhD Founder & CEO, Startup.Ready.
Shaun Digan has spent his career working on one problem: how to help people become better entrepreneurs.
Not through motivation or inspiration. Through structure. Through clearer thinking. Through systems that surface the gaps before they become costly mistakes.
Over 15 years of teaching, advising, and consulting with early-stage founders, the same patterns emerged regardless of industry, business model, or founder background. Founders who struggled weren't missing effort, intelligence, or passion. They were missing clarity... a structured way to know where they actually stood and what actually needed to change.
Startup.Ready. is the most direct expression of that work.
Shaun holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship from the University of Louisville, where his dissertation research examined how and why entrepreneurs engage in different types of learning across the entrepreneurial process. Drawing on social cognitive theory, his research investigated the relationships between prior performance, organizational context, and personal cognitive characteristics in shaping what and how founders learn.
His key finding reframed entrepreneurial learning not as an outcome to be achieved but as an ongoing process. One that is shaped by the conditions founders operate in and the cognitive patterns they bring to uncertainty. That research is the intellectual foundation of the Startup Readiness Framework and the six pillars it measures.
He is the author of Persuade: The 4-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions, published by Wiley in 2021, a practitioner-focused framework for understanding how decisions actually get made and how to influence them more effectively. His academic work has been published in the Journal of Small Business Strategy, the Journal of Small Business Management, the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, and presented at the Academy of Management.
Before founding Startup.Ready., Shaun built a consulting practice working directly with founders on business strategy, go-to-market planning, financial modeling, and pitch development. That work, hundreds of founder engagements across industries and stages, is where the pattern recognition behind the Startup Readiness Framework was developed and refined.
He also writes Foundations of Innovation, a weekly essay series tracing the intellectual history behind the startup world. Each issue examines what the thinkers [Schumpeter, Darwin, Kahneman, Ries, Drucker] actually said and what it means for founders building something today. The series is published weekly on Substack and the Startup.Ready. blog.
Shaun is based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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