How viable is your business idea? (interactive calculator)

What does it matter? My startup is simply a vehicle to move money from your pension fund's investment account into my personal account.

It doesn't matter whether the idea is viable, it only matters if you can attract VC investment. And while viable ideas attract VC investment, there are plenty of stupid ideas that get more than their fair share of dosh these days.

A viable business idea has the downside that it will be obvious it's viable to many different teams and thus attract competition.

A better standard is "plausible, but not necessarily viable." This will scare away the competition yet retain the early investors.

So the question you should be asking is "how PLAUSIBLE is your ML/LLM idea?"

Jason Cohen (founder of WP Engine, among others) recently wrote a super interesting blog post "Excuse me, is there a problem" [1].

In his post, he explains why even identifying an actual problem and solving that problem isn't usually enough to create a viable business.

Further down in the post, he also comes up with a scoring system to rate business ideas (with all obvious caveats and exceptions of such a calculation).

One cool aspect of this is that you can simulate how your positioning (e.g. higher pricing, combined with narrower target audience) may change your chances of survival as a business.

Being a Google Sheets noob, I created an interactive version of the calculator and linked it above. Hope you find it interesting :)

Whoops, forgot the link to the blog post: https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/