Courtland's Startup Validation Checklist
Courtland's Business Idea Validation Checklist This validation checklist is loosely modeled off of Brian Balfour's Four Fits, which I highly recommend reading about: It's also modeled off of my personal goals. Some of them may be goals you share (e.g. build a company that can be self-sustaini...
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That list is pretty antithetical to my views. It's so long as to be more rabbit hole inducing than illuminating, at least for me.
My list would be:
That's it.
Two thoughts on this:
First thought: Anything you start is going to have lots of potential rabbit holes, because regardless of how we may want to simplify things, the fact remains that the world is expansive and businesses are always full of unrealized opportunities. In addition, the number of potential distractions is only going to grow the longer we work on something, the more we talk to people about it, the more we think about it, etc.
The result is that analysis paralysis and loss of focus are indeed big risks! But we can't simply tune everything out and declare the problem solved, because it's crucial to be able to explore and consider new options as a founder.
The only choice remaining is to develop the muscle for focus, for restraint, for putting things into perspective. It's something every founder needs to be good at.
I liken it to hiring early-stage employees. If your first developer hire is obsessed with writing software at enterprise-quality, they'll move so slowly that they won't be very helpful. You want someone who's more founder-like, who can assess, "How important is what I'm working on? How does it compare to other priorities? And how deep should I dive into this hole?"
If that's what we'd expect from early employees, then as founders, we should be exercising that same muscle more than anyone.
Second thought: It's easy to underestimate what we already know. I'm reading a book called The Secret of Our Success. There's a section in it that compares what a modern child learns compared to ancient or primitive children:
That's just the tip of the iceberg. The amount of knowledge we take for granted is absolutely massive. We learn things that seem obvious but that we'd never figure out in a thousand years if left to our own devices.
So I'd guess that your validation checklist is actually quite a bit longer than 4 items, but many of them are so ingrained that you don't even need to list them. Or perhaps you feel confident deriving them from your 4 higher-level principles.
I personally like to use long checklists as aids, however, especially for infrequent decisions such as, "Should I start company X?" It doesn't require super deep analysis. Just a quick run through to help prevent mistakes I might not have seen coming and to aid in collecting low-hanging fruit I might not have noticed.
Good point from the book... ancient Roman mathematicians struggled with long division due to a less efficient representation. There are a ton of cognitive artifacts helping (and hindering) me go through my short list.
I did use to have a super long one, FWIW.
👏 Such an important factor
Having built multiple products without traction, and one with (which means I got lucky), I'll probably not build the next product until I have presales.
Nothing less will convince me to start building a product.
Once you get burned, you have a phobia for the rest of your life.
@csallen is it ok to share this via a blog post? I just listened to your interview on the Syntax podcast where this is mentioned and would 1) Like to use it for my CaaS idea, Hacker Origins 2) share it with others 3) share it with Wes and Scott. Thanks!
Sure!
Thanks!
Great list!
I think another good one is founder/product fit.
Agreed. I think the founder fits to basically all of these things… product, market, and even distribution channel. Not every founder wants to go on podcasts, not every founder loves Twitter, etc.