Assumption is the Mother of All F**kups

How many assumptions are baked into the idea you’re working on? In other words, how many things have to go right for you to be right?

In my experience, almost no one (including me on more than one occasion) actually sits down and lists all of the assumptions that are being made. The “so what” of not doing this ahead of time is that you end up burning time and money on tech, marketing, building a product, and all sorts of other areas that are completely unnecessary.

Here’s a few questions to help get the process going.

• Who is the actual buyer of my product, the economic decision maker?
• Who are all of the people in the value chain at my customer’s business that have to say yes? (Hint: If you’re selling to a business there’s almost always more than 1) If you’re building a two-sided marketplace product, it usually more than doubles.
• What are the criteria by which they’ll think your product is better enough to switch? (Hint: There’s always a switching cost, even if it’s from pen and paper. You need to understand it. A good rule of thumb is that your product has to be 10x better or 10x cheaper to get someone to switch)
• How much of my solution has to be ready right now in order for someone to say yes? Your temptation will be to say “All of it!” when in reality you often need very little to show customers you’re on the right track
• Is there any way, ANY WAY, I can do this faster and cheaper than how I’m thinking about it right now?
• Have I built out a fully loaded financial model to ensure that my pricing will support the cost to deliver the product? (This one exercise will expose so many assumptions it will scare you).

What you want to pay close attention to is the moments in answering these questions where you gloss over something and hear your brain saying “Of course people will …”

Everything that can be known must be known.

The more time and effort you put in to understand every part of your business, the more sober-minded you will become.

You may very well look at the list you’ve created and say “In spite of all of these things, I still believe in it. I’m still going forward.”

What will be really difficult is for you to get to the end of your runway and realize you could’ve known the answer to the thing that put you out of business. Trust me. I’ve done it. It sucks.