I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good
checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this
already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release,
and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and
tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match my model of
the world, so I wrote up my own list. I use this list both to develop ideas and filter them. If you adopt
it, be careful about using it as a filter. Remember that in the early
stages, good ideas are very easy to kill. What’s your company’s stock ticker symbol?
Is it likely to be the most important company started this year?
Thanks to Darryl Ramm for feedback on this post.Product
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@benedictevans: “The iTunes Store
solved a user problem. So did the App Store. And so did Spotify and
Apple Music, and indeed Apple News. But what user problem is solved
by Apple’s commissioning TV shows?”
Peter Drucker: Is the product
being designed for the customer, or at the customer?
@BrianNorgard: No one cares
about your product. Who built it, its features, the origin story —
it’s all superfluous. People only find value in what your product
can do for them right now. Save people time. Save people money.
Give people an escape. The selfish hand will always govern.
Peter Drucker: Are you really
doing the best you can to help the customer?
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See also: The Rise of Worse is Better,
Worse is worse
NUM_USERS * ACV =
MARKET_SIZE
. Are your numbers credible? Find a good reference
class if you’re building something completely new.
See also: Shut up and multiply
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See also: Do Things that Don’t Scale
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See also: Five ways to build a $100 million business
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Yes/no
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See also: Tesla master plan,
iPhone runs OSX
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See also: How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy
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Yes/no
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See also: Your intervention won’t work
@sama: “it’s easy/fun to say every
new startup you hear about is bad. you will usually be right. you will
never be successful.”
George Orwell: “Whoever is winning
at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”