Decision playbook
Validate an Opportunity
Research for testing whether a problem is real, a market is attractive, and an idea deserves more time or capital.
Replace enthusiasm with evidence by combining customer insight, market structure, base rates, and cheap experiments.
Mental models
Test the underlying assumptions
Find the beliefs that must be true before the opportunity can work.
People
Study category creators
See how founders recognized demand before the market looked obvious.
Businesses
Compare validated models
Inspect businesses that turned a specific unmet need into a category.
Decision tools
Run a cheap test
Design a falsifiable experiment before making an expensive commitment.
Frequently asked questions
- What evidence matters before building?
- Look for repeated painful behavior, existing workarounds, willingness to pay, and a reachable group with the same problem.
- When should an opportunity be abandoned?
- Stop when the critical assumption fails repeatedly and each new test requires a different story to preserve the original conclusion.