Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

STEP 20

Identify Key Assumptions

IN THIS STEP, YOU WILL:

• Determine which assumptions about your business have not been thoroughly tested.
• Rank your top 5 to 10 assumptions in order of importance.

Everything is looking and feeling good but before you go and build, step back and revisit again with the benefit of greater wisdom—what are the key assumptions that need to go right for your new venture to work?

You now have an understanding of who the customer is, what value you bring to them, how they will acquire your product, how much it costs to acquire a customer, and how much profit the customer will bring to you. However, yours is a new business with a product that has not previously existed. You are making certain assumptions based on logic and research, but without identifying and rigorously testing your assumptions, you will not know if they are valid. You have initially tested some of these assumptions already in the course of earlier steps; but in this step you will directly ...