Minimum Viable Vision – the startup checklist I’ve been waiting for

Fantastic post on Year One Labs blog about Minimum Viable Vision. It captures something I have been trying to define for a few months now. How can you measure your interner startup idea’s potential? And they dive in the details. Here’s the outline:

1. You’re building a platform
2. You have recurring ways to make money
3. You’ve got tiered pricing
4. You’re tied to a disruptive change
5. Adopters automatically become advocates
6. You can create a bidding war
7. You’re riding an environmental change
8. You’ve got a sustainable unfair advantage
9. Your marginal costs tend to zero
10. There are inherent network effects in the model
11. You have several ways you can monetize it
12. You make money when your customers make money
13. An ecosystem will form around you

I’m sending this one to everyone I advise… and the next step once you review this list? What’s your score?

If you are under 8/13 you have some homework to do. Around 10/30 is incredible. You nail all 13? Liar!

To give you some perspective, after 3 years of working on Praized (now focused on Needium), I think we are probably at 10/13 on that list. Twitter and Facebook are probably at 11 or 12. I might add that going from 7 to 13 is most likely exponential, meaning that going from 8 to 9 is twice as hard as going from 7 to 8, and so on.

Go read the full post, worth all the minutes you will invest in it, plus all the time spent afterward to step up your game with that check list.