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