A friend sent me a business brief a few weeks ago. A pantry-matching dinner app: tell it what’s in your kitchen, it matches it against your own family recipes, and when nothing fits, it improvises something from what’s on hand. The writing was clean, the problem was real, and the name he’d landed on tested strong against every naming framework I own.
I wanted to just tell him to build it. That would have been the easy, generous thing to say.
Instead I ran the brief through the same system I run every opportunity through, mine or anyone else’s. Nine categories, scored out of five apiece: how clear the customer is, how painful the problem really is, whether there’s a real lever for revenue, whether distribution exists or has to be invented from nothing, and so on. Forty-five points total, plus one more score only the founder can give himself, would he actually stay obsessed with this for two years.
The brief scored well. Customer clarity, four out of five. Recurring revenue potential, four out of five. The brand and the name, genuinely the strongest part of the whole package.
Distribution scored a two.
There are over five thousand apps in the App Store’s Food and Drink category alone. Most of them are dead. I told him flat out: the App Store is a cemetery. A good idea and a good name are not enough to survive it.
Final score: 28 out of 50. Needs Validation, not Strong. Not because the idea was bad. Because nobody, including him, had a real answer for how the first hundred users would find this thing that didn’t amount to hoping the App Store noticed.
That’s the part of a first call nobody sees from the outside. People assume I’m listening for whether an idea is good. Good ideas are common. I’m listening for whether this one has earned the right to be built yet, or whether it still only deserves to be tested.
Here’s close to word for word what I wrote back to him: before you think about a tech stack, answer one question. Who are your first hundred users, and how do you reach them personally today? Not through the App Store. Not through ads. Personally.
Then I gave him something concrete to chase instead of a launch date. There’s a cooking channel on YouTube with four point six million subscribers, built entirely around people who love food but still don’t know what to make. More Americans watch cooking shows than actually cook, and that gap is the whole business. Helpful, honest comments in the communities where those people already ask “what’s for dinner” every single night are a zero-cost way to find the first thousand users before a single screen gets built.
Validate first. Build second. The idea deserves to be tested. It doesn’t yet deserve to be built.
I told a friend, essentially, not yet, on an idea I genuinely liked. That’s an uncomfortable thing to put in writing. It’s also the whole job.
If this sounds like the diagnosis in “The Last 20%,” it’s the same problem. That post named it. This is what it looks like running live, on someone I like, where the easy thing would have cost me nothing to say.
The businesses I actually work with aren’t pitching me app ideas on a first call. They already have a real business. But the same categories apply to the next hire, the next redesign, the next product line, the next dollar you’re about to spend. Who are the first hundred people who’d actually use or buy the new thing, by name if you can manage it. Have you shown it to real people and asked them to pay today, or is “they’d love this” still a guess. Do you already own a way to reach people, a list, a following, a referral network, or are you starting from zero. And if the growth is slow for a year, will you actually still want this.
If you can’t answer the first one, the idea isn’t ready. It doesn’t matter how good the brief looks.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription
P.S. If something you’re building, or something you already built, has never had those four questions run against it honestly, that’s exactly what a free 20-minute working call is for. yourwebguy.org/become-a-client. No pitch, just the same four questions I ran on my friend’s app.