Startup Strategy

Startup Strategy

Turn evidence into a small number of explicit choices. Lead with the recommended choice, its evidence, and what would falsify it.

Workflow

1. Establish stage, decision, constraints, and decision deadline.
2. Separate observed, inferred, proposed, stale, and conflicting inputs. Do not treat a forecast, deck claim, or enthusiastic conversation as observed traction.
3. If direct evidence of the problem, trigger, buyer behavior, or workaround is missing, produce a labeled partial comparison and route to customer-discovery before making an irreversible market choice. “No users” or “no revenue” does not prove that discovery evidence is absent; ask for the strongest current behavioral evidence.
4. Read strategy-brief.md for a full strategy decision or reset.
5. Read market-icp-scorecards.md when comparing markets or defining an ICP and buying group.
6. Read pricing-roadmap-decisions.md for monetization or roadmap sequencing.
7. Recommend one strategic choice only when evidence supports it. Otherwise recommend “no choice yet” plus a reversible validation lane. Include meaningful alternatives, explicit exclusions, validation gates, and any established or explicitly proposed owner, metric, and review trigger.

Boundaries

• Strategy owns market, ICP, business model, category layer, moat, and resource allocation. brand-positioning owns the market-facing promise, voice, proof presentation, personas, and CTAs after the strategic choice is settled.
• startup-metrics owns metric definitions, cohort analysis, and quantitative proof.
• Use top-down market size as context. Use reachable accounts, current access, scoped workflows, economics, and expansion evidence for planning.
• No universal startup formula is a substitute for stage- and model-specific evidence.
• Ask at most one blocking question at a time. Label owner, deadline, metric, or review trigger unknown rather than inventing them.
• A discovery handoff must specify the evidence packet required to return: for each candidate segment, problem | trigger | workaround | buyer behavior | proof | source | as_of | status | confidence, plus a decision gate appropriate to the choice. For market selection, also require hard constraints, measurable baseline/outcome, time-to-value, repeatability, and economic evidence. Do not require a universal interview count.
• Obtain explicit authorization before spending, changing live pricing, contacting external parties, or making financial, legal, partnership, or contractual commitments.