Startup Readiness: Validation, Framework & Tools

Most founders segment their market by who people are. Industry, role, company size, age, geography. They build a slide with three or four boxes, each one a type of person, and they call it segmentati...

Most founders can tell you their customer's workaround is expensive. Almost none can tell you how expensive.They describe it in adjectives. It is inefficient. It is frustrating. It takes forever. Eve...

You walk out of a customer conversation sure you understood it. You did. That is not the problem.The problem is what you kept. You stored the meaning and dropped the phrasing. A week later you can ex...

Read your problem description out loud. If it leans on words like inefficiency, friction, visibility, engagement, or pain point, there is a good chance the person hearing it cannot picture what you a...

Most founders worry their problem might not be real. The more dangerous possibility is that it is real and nobody cares enough to do anything about it.A real problem and a painful problem are not the...

Ask a founder to describe the problem they are solving, and most of them describe their product instead.They do not notice they are doing it. The description sounds like a problem. It has a customer ...

Most founders treat frequency as a single number. The problem happens monthly, or weekly, or twice a year, and that number goes in the deck.The number hides the thing that matters. A problem you meas...

Most founders ask whether their problem is real. Far fewer ask what shape it is.Shape is the combination of two things: how often the problem happens, and how much it costs when it does. Frequency an...

Most founders describe their problem from the inside out.They know what they want to build. They work backward to the problem it solves. What comes out sounds like a product brief. Clean, confident, ...