This checklist began in 2017 and has been continuously updated as it gets applied on new ideas and graduate startups. It is developed with the founder's, mentor's, coach's and investor's perspectives to develop an organization that can stand the test of time. It has been recently updated to adopt Sun Tzu's Art of War's framework.
Last updated: Mar 2021
Just Cause
Refers to WHY your organization should exist Vision What is the aim of what you are doing? Is your aim translatable into a vision or a cause that others can relate to?
Who would be inspired to follow the vision?
Why are they emotionally responding to the vision?
Would those inspired by your vision be willing to become your customers?
Would those inspired by your vision be willing to become your team members?
Who would resist your vision?
Why are they resisting your vision?
What can you do to assuage their resistance?
What can you do to convert those who resist you into becoming your partners?
Heaven
Refers to things in the environment that are unlikely to be managed directly by you, such as governments, markets etc
Social Environment and Government How would the government view your idea?
Is your idea resisting or aligned with the government's values and objectives?
Is your idea resisting or aligned with the prevalent cultures' values?
Market
Is this an existing market for your products/services to trade on or a market that you have to create? For clarity, cryptocurrency is operating in an existing currency market, while SpaceX is creating a Mars colonization market.
If you need to create a new market, what are the steps and resources needed?
How is your market changing? Is is shrinking or expanding? Is there a clear pattern?
What forces promotes the market to continue sustaining into the future?
What forces promotes the demise of market?
Did your market emerge due to a temporary event? What is the timeframe available for you before the market doesn't require your product/service?
How big is your potential market?
What are the barriers to enter that market?
How are the PESTEL trends changing? Political - Economic - Social - Technological - Environmental - Legal
Define the changes and and how will you cope with it to sustain your business.
How do you inform the market of your presence? What is the company's marketing strategy and the required costs?
How are your positioning yourself in the market?
What marketing methods are you using? Why? And why not for those not chosen.
Product Market Fit
Who are your customers?
Are you targeting businesses or individuals?
Business: Where are they located? How big are they? What other information can describe them?
Individuals: Where are they located? What is the age distribution? What is their occupation?
Please provide at least one descriptive persona of your customers.
How well you understand your customer directly correlates to the success of your startup. Hence you should also include customer persona information that are not related to your startup.
What part of the value chain are you trying to service/capture? Who are the existing players there? How did they achieve that position? What are the gaps between what is sought after by demand and not fulfilled by curreny suppliers? Does your product/service fill that gap?
How long will it take for you to enter and be noticed?
What traction have you made so far?
What are the main reasons for those traction?
Does your offering require a certain ecosystem (established products/services in the market) to work? Is it available? If it is not available, are you capable of creating the ecosystem?
Earth
Refers to things in the environment that are likely to be managed directly by you, such as business location, logistics etc
Immediate Environment Is your idea dependent on specific locations to reach your customers? Why? Where are the locations/territory of your competitors?
Is the target environment safe to conduct your business? Is the target environment accessible by your operations?
Product
What is the market need/customer pain you are trying to solve?
Why is it important?
Does your customers need that or you assumed they do? Do you have evidence?
How are they dealing with the problem your are trying to solve at the moment?
How are you solving it?
Are you solving it in an intuitive manner?
How long has the problem been there?
What part of the value chain are your trying to service?
How will your offering integrate with what is currently used? Why will the customers buy your product/service?
What are the unique selling proposition of the product/service?
What technology are you basing your offering on?
Is the technology in the testing phase or the performance is stable?
What is the requirements and costs associated with adopting such technology?
Are there any risks? What are they?
Do you have a prototype/demo/proof of concept for your product/service?
How much does it cost?
How much will MVP cost?
What have you learned from early versions (prototype) introduced to your customers?
What improvements are required by the customer compared to what was planned?
How did you change your product?
How many different versions would be developed?
Are the production/development milestones defined ?
How are you monitoring quality?
What are the defined success criteria?
How many criteria have you met so far?
Did you add/change any criteria? Name them
Who are your suppliers?
How many suppliers are you relying on? Why?
Where are your suppliers located?
Does your suppliers hold an advantage that impose a risk on manufacturing your product? Whats the contigency?
How are you starting your manufacturing/development?
Where are you holding your manufacturing/development?
Do you have the resources and flexibility to pivot to another product/service?
What are the potential options your can pivot to?
Competitive Advantage What is your competitive advantage? Is it knowledge, processes, privileged access etc? How resilient is your competitive advantage to diffusion?
Competitors
Who are your direct competitors? Direct competitors are those who offer similar products/services to yours. Who are your indirect competitors? Indirect competitors are those whose products/services would deny your customers from consuming yours.
Where are they located? Physically and market positioning wise
What customer segment are they targeting?
How is your product/service better than your competition?
What is your competitive edge over what is offered? How much better?
Can you put a quantitative number to how much better your product/service is compared to your competition?
What competitive edge your competitors have over you?
What are your plans to manage your current and potential competitors?
Business Moats
What are the things that only your organization can make a claim to?
Where should you position your business in the market?
How can you increase the barrier of entry for new competitors?
Leadership & Culture
Refers to the character and capability of the founder(s) and management, and how their actions create the culture which can make or break the startup Internal Alignment
How well do you know of your team's alignment with the organization's vision and goals?
What are you doing to reinforce the organization's vision and goals? What are you doing that shows that you are not advancing the organization's vision and goals?
What motivates the founders and team members to stay in the game when it gets tough and when success comes slower than expected?
What are the team members' tolerance level in accepting your mistakes?
What are the list of steps you must take to avoid making mistakes?
What are the list of steps you must take to fix mistakes?
Leadership Growth
Is this your 1st start up?
What makes you as an individual suited for this idea?
Do you have a coach? The role of a coach is to identify your Unknown Unknowns. Do you have a network of mentors to call upon? The role of a mentor is to convert your Known Unknowns into what you know and able to apply.
Who are your coaches and mentors? What are his/her background?
How fast can you learn new knowledge?
Does you find it enjoyable to learn new knowledge? Do you look for ways to do things differently than you did yourself before? How able are you to accept that you were wrong?
Decision Making
How do you make decisions? Do you make decisions following a standard process?
Have you assigned people to challenge your decisions?
Planning and executing. Which one is more important? Why?
Risk Management
What are the potential risks you might face and the contengency plan?
What did you do to identify the answers to all the checklist items?
What sources did you rely on for your data?
What are the assumptions did you make?
How strong are the assumptions? Can the assumptions be backed up with evidence? Are the evidences first party evidences, second party evidences or third party evidences?
Vision Management
How big is the vision?
What needs to be done to realize the vision?
How fast can you realize that potential?
How do you plan to scale the business in the next year?
What is the next step IPO or M&A?
When do you see that happening?
Who are the likely buyers/investors?
Strategic Management
Are you allocating enough time and attention just for strategic management?
Are your board of directors strategic thinking? Do you have a board of advisors to supplement your weak points?
How much time and attention are you allocating to eradicate fire fighting and transition the organization on growth instead?
What are the steps taken to ensure that the organization's six capitals are intact and continually reinforced?
Culture Management
What is the prime value of the organization?
Are the values of the organization aligned with the organization's cause?
What are the steps to mould culture "imported" by new hires/partners into a coherent one that serves the vision?
How is the culture reinforced?
Team Quality & Organizational Strength
Refers to the characters and capabilities of the team members in running the startup
Internal Alignment Does the team have the passion for the meaning behind the cause of the organizations?
What are the team members' expectations of the organization?
How long has the team known each other and how would you rate your cohesion?
Does all team members trust each other on the personal and professional levels?
Organization Building
Define your business plan and key assumptions made
Rate the strength of your assumptions and support the rating with evidences What are the short, medium and long term goals?
What are the milestones needed to reach goals successfully?
What is the minimum you need to achieve the milestones in a satisfactorily manner according to stakeholders?
Are you able to define the projects and its associated required resources in detail to accelerate the achievement of specific milestones?
Are you able to plot out the pivots you need to make if certain learnings or events occur?
Skills & Quality
How do you hire your people?
Do you hire for skills or for attitude? Why for either?
Is your hiring process something that you learnt from legacy or a response to the current reality?
What major problems have you encountered in hiring? Why those major problems occur? What could you have done before hiring to prevent such problems? Would it make more sense to spend more time in the planning of recruitments?
Did any of your team members build or co founded a start up? If so, describe current status?
Did you or your team members work in a start up environment before?
What specific skills/experience your team individuals has for this business?
What industrial experience your team individuals has for this business?
How do you complement each other in the team?
Why are your team members here?
Do you think passion is important in start-up? Why?
Who lacks passion for the idea in your team?
What does everyone add to the business?
Who is the team leader? Why ?
Who can affect the outcome and who is responsible for implementation?
Are there any unfilled roles that requires specific skills?
What are the critical members the team needs to be added?
What is the defined responsibilites of each team member in details?
Have your team changed so far in your journey?
What changed in your team? Why?
How was the rest of team affected by leave/addition of memebrs?
How is the team reacting to the current status of uncertainty? (grinding phase)
How do you/team members cope with change?
How fast can the team learn new knowledge?
Does the team find it enjoyable to learn new knowledge?
Does the team look for ways to do things differently than they did before? How able are the team to accept that they were wrong? What are the skills your team have currently perfected?
Can the team rotate tasks among themselves ?
Is the team getting paid?
How do you measure the performace of the team?
Is performance aligning with your operations planning and pre set goals?
Do you assess your employee job satisfaction? What is the result?
How do you develop current employees?
Financial Management
How do you secure your financial capital to start?
Do you need investors? Why?
How do you plan to raise funds?
Do you know what is the fundraising process and rounds are? Do you know what are the types of investors out there and what are they looking for?
How are you going to make money for investors?
What is the current capitalization table / equity breakdown?
What is your companies valuation? On what basis do you use to derive the valuation?
Is the valuation method be deemed acceptable by your stakeholders?
How does your business generate income?
Does the unit economics make sense?
What is your gross and net profit margin? Which pricing model is most suitable? Are you able to provide a justifiable reason(s) why other models are unsuitable?
What are the financial projections for your company in the next 3 years?
What are your assumptions?
How are you allocating your expenes (Human/production/development/customer acquisition/IT system) ?
Do you rely on local or foreign currency? Why ?
How much will you burn before you reach operational breakeven?
When is your projected breakeven point?
What is your Projected ROI?
What financial factors are limiting your progress?
What financial expenses are limiting your growth?
What financial mistakes have you made so far?
How much debt did you accumulate so far?
What are the interest rates on any finances secured and can they be reduced?
Do you need any more financing?
How much do you need?
How are you going to spend it?
Will additional finances be equity/debt based?
What are the possible black swan events that could impact your startup? (ie. pandemic) What are the contingency plans in place to respond to possible black swan events? Should there be a reserve fund to weather no sales for a certain amount of months?
Legal and Regulatory
Is your current business entity suitable for fundraising?
Do you have a Shareholder's Agreement in place? Are your company secretary, accountant, auditor and tax agents familiar with startup needs?
What are the commercial laws your company have to follow?
What is your company's business conduct and ethic code?
Would you risk to violate the law to exempt from tax? Why?
Would your company use trade secrets in inappropriate way? Why?
What comfort do you have that the company will not get sued for breaching contract or legislation between your company and your partners?
What comfort do you have that the company will not get sued for breaching contract or legislation between your company and your investors?
What comfort do you have that the company will not get sued for breaching contract or legislation between your company and your consumer?
Are you aware of Malaysia Consumer Protection Act 1999 and follow the law?
Do you breach contract or legislation between your company and your employees?
Are you aware of Malaysia Employment Act 1955 and follow the law?
Intellectual Property
Does your business rely on patents?
Are you familiar with IP right infringement and how to avoid it?
Sales/Operations
How are you starting your sales?
Which sales method is most appropriate? Why and why not for those not chosen?
What sales have you made so far?
How long did it take to secure your first sales?
What is the company's sales strategy? Why and why not for those not chosen?
How are you tracking your sales progress?
Describe the customer journey from awareness to purchase.
What are the main reasons for lead's resistance at each stage? What are the main reasons for lead's buy-in at each stage?
What is the conversion rate at each stage?
How long is the cycle?
What are the key points your customers like in your offering?
How can you make it better?
How are customers engaging with your company?
What is the customer acquisition rate?
Is the customer acquisition rate acceptable and comparable to bechmarks?
What is the cost of customer acquisition?
Is the cost of customer acquisition acceptable and comparable to bechmarks? Do you have recurring customers?
Do you have a sales forecast?
How much was spent to get there?
Does it align to your forcast?
Is your manufacturing capacity meeting your customer demand?
Are you manufacturing to order/forecast/stocking?
How are you handling your stock?
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