Sensible business start-up questions

The following focused questions have served Nynke as mirrors and guides working in/on a Valley start-up. Being suggested some business patterns that were perhaps applicable as well, was in and off itself already valuable to me. Trying to understand if the patterns could perhaps indeed be reuseful for us, even more. And some of the questions asked may possibly be (re)useful questions for some other context.

Integration questions

Do we address more value dimensions than just resources and capital in our considerations?
Are other stakeholder needs adressed? Complex financial models often hide simple and fundamental flaws, which would show up in a back-of-the envelope check ...

Executive play questions

Can we tell a compelling story?
Does our story convey mission, sizes of markets, edge, opportunity?
Do we know the amounts of funds we require? Do we have back-of-the-envelope business cases with numbers or budgets with regard to finances?
Have we chosen a financial strategy?
Do we have fitting funds or budgets?

Logical questions

Can we give a sound rationale for edge and opportunity?
Can we provide detailed evidence/validation/evaluation of: Our customers? Existing sizeable markets? Plans for realizing our named edge and opportunity?

Functionality questions

Customer and user needs

Are our assessments of user needs the result of interactions with users?
Can we express embodied knowledge about the behaviors of these players?
Are we prepared for the logistics of product and service delivery and customer support and billing and collections and inventory and all that kind of stuff?

Markets

Are markets appropriately sized?
Are they substantial in size and/or potential gain?
Is there data to substantiate these market sizes?

IP Strategy and position

Depending on location and patent law, and on whether something is patentable, even if only to protect a key future space from being owned by someone else for perhaps less noble reasons, patenting can be taken in consideration?
If so, what are strengths of our IP and patent strategy and position?

Market and competitive risks

Do we have comparative information on direct and indirect competitors?
Do we understand the pricing of comparative products?
Do we know of at least two existing other ways our customers might solve their problems?

Commercialization

Does edge and opportunity of our products and services position us well with features, edges and gains of competitive technologies and services?

Functional organisation

Can our company undergo permanent deformation under load? Does it move and deform properly in response to external stress?
Integrated marketing: Is every action taken by, every communication of our company, perfectly aligned with the business that we wish to become or are in the process of becoming?

Risk management

Do we have contingency or risk management in place?
Are values mapped for each distinguished strategy?
Systems thinking: Do we observe, measure and map demand values; supply values; income demand; cross of value demands; arc values; import substitution; output values; beta coefficient of assets returned?

Skills and abilities

-- these questions can help us check our cognitive map whether we have a fitting variety of skills (or kinds of people), perspectives, sufficient for the tensegrity we need in our team or collective for a particular purpose.

Are all required (business) skills covered, including product or service dependend research, development and engineering skills and abilities?
Does our product require us to build support functions for our customers?
Can our organizational and IT structures change to cope with changes in the environment?
Can healthy and functional areas of management take over some of the functions of a damaged and non-functional area of management?
Do people in our company seem to easily change their ways in response to events?