You have a business idea. Turn it into a plan.
Six questions. See the weakest link in the idea, and what winning would cost.
Pressure test the idea before it costs anything
Six questions and two numbers. It names the weakest link, and what winning would cost to deliver.
How many customers would you want in year one?
The number that would make this worth having done.
Hours to serve one of them, for a year
Everything: delivery, support, billing, the awkward calls. Guess high.
Winning would take, in people
0
Where this stands
Answer the six
The weakest link
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Before it goes to the board
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An idea becomes a plan when six things have answers: who it is for, what evidence says they want it, where the first ten customers come from, who owns it, what it costs to deliver, and what it costs to stop.
Is it a fit?
Buyer
You can name who pays, not who benefits. They are often two different people.
Proof
Something has already happened that a stranger would accept as evidence.
Cost
What winning looks like has a price, and it is one you could fund.
What you get
Pressure testing the idea
Six questions that find the weakest link before money moves.
The operating plan
Not a pitch deck.
The first ten customers
Where they come from by name and in what order, what they are being sold.
The stop condition
A result, a date, and a number that would end it, agreed while being honest is still cheap.
Plans do not usually fail on the idea
Most advice about turning an idea into a plan is about the market: is it big enough, who else is in it, what would you charge. Those questions are worth asking and they are not usually the ones that kill it. Ideas inside working businesses tend to die somewhere more boring.
They die because nobody owns them. The idea gets support from everyone in the room, which feels like momentum and is the problem, because a thing that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. Six months later it has had eleven conversations and no first customer, and it fades without anyone ever deciding to stop.
When the plan is going in front of investors, preparing for a raise is the next step. Once the plan holds up, MVP development builds the smallest version that tests it.
Six questions a plan has to survive
An idea that answers all six is fundable, whether the money comes from a bank, an investor or your own operating account. An idea that answers four of them is a hypothesis with a budget.
| The question | A weak answer | An answer you can act on |
|---|---|---|
| Who is it for? | Anyone with this problem. Any company that needs this. | A group you can count, or better, a list you can name. If you cannot list twenty, the segment is a guess. |
| What evidence is there that anyone wants it? | Everyone we describe it to says it is a great idea. | Somebody gave up something to get it: money, a signature, a date in their calendar, a pilot slot. |
| Where do the first ten customers come from? | Marketing. We would run some ads. | Named sources in order, with the first three reachable this week. Selling to people you already serve is a different business from selling to strangers. |
| Who owns it on Monday morning? | The leadership team. All of us, really. | One person, by name, with hours cleared and something else taken off them to make room. |
| What does delivering it cost? | We would figure that out once it takes off. | Hours to serve one customer, times the number you want, converted into people. Then check whether those people exist. |
| What does it cost to stop? | We have not really thought about that. | A number and a date, agreed now while being honest is still cheap. Written down before anyone is emotionally invested. |
The fourth row decides more outcomes than the other five together. An idea that everybody supports and nobody owns will be discussed warmly for a year and then quietly dropped.
Questions we get
We have the idea and no time to work on it. Is that fatal?
It is the most common reason ideas stall, and it is fixable in exactly one way: take something off the owner. Adding an idea to a full plate is a decision to do it slowly while pretending otherwise.
Do we need a written plan?
You need the six answers written somewhere. Whether that is a document, a page, or a table depends on who has to act on it and whether outside money is involved.
How much evidence is enough before committing?
One person giving up something real beats fifty saying it sounds great. Money is the clearest signal, but a signed pilot, a blocked calendar slot, or an introduction to their own customer all count.
Should a new line sit inside the existing business or beside it?
Inside is cheaper and slower, because it inherits your systems, your approvals and your calendar. Beside is faster and more expensive, and it duplicates things you already own.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built
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