Here’s how you answer that question in 10 steps:
- The top five things that differentiate your company from your competition (these must be things that make you different, not better)
- The specific pain that you solve for your customers
- No more than eight words that describe how you solve that specific pain
- The six defining characteristics of your ideal customer
- Your market size in annual spending on your products/services expressed as ARTS:
- Addressable (all customers on the planet who could conceivably buy your products/services)
- Relevant (the portion of the addressable market who currently buys your products/services)
- Target (your ideal customers)
- Serviceable (the customers you could service with your available resources; here assume that you obtained sufficient startup capital to create the minimum business model reflected in your financial projection scenarios)
- The four reasons your products/services are need to have purchases for your customers (as opposed to nice to have or want to have)
- The most important customer benefits of your products/services (these must be customer benefits, not product/service features)
- Your top three barriers to entry (the things that your company has that prevent competitive entry, e.g. intellectual property / patents, technology, sales channels, trade secrets, etc.)
- The three things that make this new business a low-risk proposition for potential investors
- One sentence that states the reasons why your founding team are people worth investing in
The answers to those 10 questions will tell you if your startup idea sucks.