For Starters #3: All Ventures Face the Same 6 Riskiest Assumptions

"If it doesn't kill you it'll make you stronger
But if it kills you you'll be dead"
- Jonathan Coulton, "Madeline" - https://www.jonathancoulton.com/store/#downloads

The way to maximize resource constraints - across time, money, and skills - as you should be at the very beginning, is to aggressively chipping away at the Riskiest Assumptions, 

If you're unfamiliar, Riskiest Assumptions (aka Leap of Faith Assumptions) are the underlying assumptions about your venture that if disproven will immediately end it. 

After working with dozens of Founders and even more new product ideas that never graduated the whiteboard, I can tell you - Riskiest Assumptions are always the same.

Every venture.

Exactly the same. 

When I started, I thought they were all different - different technologies, different industries, different value propositions - obviously meant wildly different Riskiest Assumptions. I've facilitated multi-day workshops with founding teams, covering whiteboards in precisely prioritized Post-Its each containing a tightly defined assumption and another with the assumption underlying it and another with the assumption underlying it and the one underlying it. 

Turns out, the first half dozen are always the same. 

I'd like to pause here and advocate for leaning into each individual Riskiest Assumption and leaning in hard. You need to be the unreasonably difficult-to-please, never-says-proud-of-you, wants-you-to-be-a-doctor, father about whether or not you've sufficiently validated them (you probably haven't). Riskiest Assumptions aren't a checklist to speed through, they're a fire swamp you send ventures through with the expressed purpose of killing them. 

Businesses survive on customer demand. The goal with Riskiest Assumptions to find and incrementally build intense customer demand for your venture - or declare the demand doesn't exist (<-- the most likely answer). 

To give you the best possible shot, Riskiest Assumptions arrive one at a time and in a specific sequence. Think of them as a series of prerequisites. If you hand wave over one and jump ahead, they don't mind, the next one will happily bite you in the ass - extra hard. 


Now that we're past the ROUS, this is a nice enough place to talk about two delightful things we don't talk about enough in StartupLand:

• Finding out someone else has developed a sufficiently good solution.

• Determining the problem itself is too small to solve. 

In both cases, the correct answer is to immediately stop.

In the former, it's far cheaper and less stressful to be a customer of this solution and file bug reports for any deficiency than it is to build the entire solution from scratch.

In the latter, what you're seeing is a version of Chesterton's Fence ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence ) - but rather than a fence, it's a mirage in the market the existing players are actively avoiding. Admittedly, each organization has it's own opportunity cost ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost ) thresholds and sometimes nascent ventures can get a foothold within spaces larger organizations have disregarded.

Sometimes. 

OK, back to the 6 Riskiest Assumptions

    1. We believe customers have [this] as a persistent, frustrating problem.
    2. We believe customers want help solving [this].
    3. We believe customers have tried multiple things to solve [this] already.
    4. We believe customers want help solving [this] from you.
    5. We believe customers will open their wallets for help from you.
    6. We believe customers will open their wallets at a level supporting your intended lifestyle.

As you can imagine there's an entire universe behind each of these. For Starters, the key takeaway is to know every venture is somewhere in these six. Once you know which number a venture is at, the next actions are clear and obvious. 

I know of at least one venture accelerator program that won't unlock the next tranche of funding until Founders conduct 50 customer interviews and articulate the problem stated by the interviewees (I did say difficult-to-please). 

1. This is second time I’ve used The Princess Bride as a metaphor for business, here's the first - https://garrickvanburen.com/what-the-princess-bride-can-teach-independent-consultants/