Founders: Avoid Death by Assumption

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
— Isaac Asimov

When you’re building a company, your ability to make good assumptions can be the difference between skyrocketing or skydiving. A few bad calls in a larger business can be damaging, but in an early stage startup it can be — and often is — fatal.

A roadmap to better

At Fruitful we’ve made a conscious effort to get better at making assumptions. We do this by mapping out the following on what we call an assumption roadmap™

For the upcoming months, we unroll a stretch of paper and stick:

• Blue Post-its → for what we assume we can do.
  An example being: We will raise a new round of venture investment because we’ve built our product and are ready for go-to-market.
• Red Post-its → for things that could undo the above (namely, risk factors).
  E.g. Investors pass on us because they can’t get comfortable with our costs to acquire new customers.
• Green Post-its → for contingencies that we develop.
  E.g. Use investor feedback to rework the pitch / consider a change in strategy / reach out to previous investors to jumpstart the round / collect data to make our pitch more compelling / secure a bridge loan (lol).

Assumption Roadmaps FTW

As a team, we’ve found the exercise to be pretty helpful since it:

• Forces you to think of worst case scenarios — every headstrong founder hates doing this but it’s important for so many reasons that go way beyond the role of this article.
• Encourages brainstorming of contingencies — and trust me, you’ll need these.
• Serves as a visual overview of
  (1) important assumptions we have over the next few months
  (2) where have a large number of risk factors
  (3) where we’re looking shallow on fallbacks for said risk factors.

Most importantly, this role your sleeves-up approach to planning is quick and simple — making it accessible for everyone on your team to contribute.

★ For extra points, use the Post-It Plus app to rearrange, organise and share your assumption roadmaps anytime after your planning sesh.