Rick's Startup Whiteboard #3: Designing a Validation Trajectory for your Startup

[If the video is not embedded above, go here]

Everyone knows that creating a startup involves a carefully-ordered sequence of steps -- eg, don't start selling your product until you have a product (actually, that's surprisingly easy to screw up). However, there's a guiding principle about designing the right sequence that doesn't get talked about enough. You need to think about designing your "Validation Trajectory". Here's the deal:

In the Pony Diving phase (see Episode #1), you're trying to put together an idea with funders, users, and a development team. But each one of these key groups is going to need to see a certain amount of proof about the viability of the project, i.e. validation, before they sign on. Of course, the killer is that these same people are going to help you establish validation, so you've got the makings of a brutal chicken-and-egg problem. The solution is a workable validation trajectory: The first key player you sign on has a low validation "buy-in". That player then produces some validation "benefit", and now you have more validation to recruit the next player. A workable validation trajectory moves you from where it's just you waving your arms to where you've got all the key players on board. A broken one leaves you needing some high-validation-buyin player without any way to get the validation to bring him/her on.

Here are pointers to a few things I called out in the video.

• Here's where Vinod Khosla discusses the Ethanol Trajectory
• Here's the LostInBoston.org project I talk about
• Here's George Eberstadt's Blog. He's my colleague who would always say "How do we get there from here?"

So now you tell me. Is this obvious? Is this useful? Is this obviously useful? I need feedback. Post it below.