The Seven Questions for Product Projects

This article was originally posted here on Medium

Many people don't realize just *how* similar venture building and product building are. Though this realization can help save millions...

Allow me to make a tough statement here:

90% of all corporate product innovation efforts would not make it through Y Combinator's basic pitch matrix. 

I did a little re-write of one of the most basic (this is a good thing) pitch matrices out there. All thanks and credit go to YC for keeping it real for so long.

So, you think your product project has what it takes? Try to make it through...

The Seven Questions

1. What do you do?

Please keep it simple and distinct. Avoid 💩bingo. You can also keep the problem to yourself for the moment. Alternatively, if you cannot describe the solution in simple terms (you should work on that!), you can walk me through the user journey.

2. How big is the market? 

This can be an internal "market", too. Try to express the value creation in numbers. If that is not possible, you have a problem, not only because you cannot explain the value, but also because you cannot measure the success.

3. What’s your progress?

Basically this gives me an insight into how quickly you make decisions and execute on them - how fast you work. I speak often enough about product cadence and time-to-market. Show me what you've got.

4. What’s your unique insight?

To quote YC: "This is similar to “What problem are you solving?” but the bar is higher." The idea here is to gain an understanding of deep customer insights which separate you from the pack.

5. What’s your “business model”?

Do you know how this solution will pay for itself? Keep it simple. If you don’t, that is acceptable at this point, but in that case, please have a couple of similar solutions and their “business models” handy.

6. Who’s on your team?

Do you have who it takes? Are they committed to the project full-time? Any superstars, or prior experience, or other things that you or your teammates bring to the table thqt we should know of?

7. What do you want?

For corporate product innovation projects, we can rephrase this into

7. What do you need to get it done?

This can, similarly to the startup question above, be money (you should know how much you need and not ask for more, it will just make you lazy and distracted)

So, how hard was it? Did you have answers to all Seven Questions for your product project? How do you feel about them? Would you present them in an investor-pitch-like situation? Let me know in the comments 👇, like, share and subscribe, and contact me if you feel like you want to talk about your product.

Thanks,

Marc

PS: here are the original Seven Questions: https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-pitch-your-company/