If Zuck, Jack, Evan & Bobby, Sergey & Larry were to pitch their Series A today…
10 questions to ask when evaluating a consumer web (non-transactional) product.
Published in
2 min readNov 20, 2013
- Is the product truly differentiated from anything else out there (you can not use another startup’s product to describe it)?
- How would my mother in Greece explain the product (in 5 words or less) to her friends?
- If you were to present the product to somebody from the 1800s, would they feel like it is serving a core human need or solving a problem?
- Whose distribution is the product leveraging/riding (e.g. YouTube → MySpace, Google → Yahoo!)?
- What is the fundamental technology that is making this product possible now (e.g. front-facing camera → Snapchat, GPS → Waze, back-facing camera → Instagram)?
- Why does the service become better for the user over time, if others join (e.g. the more friends you have on Facebook, the better the experience is)?
- Five years in, if there are no changes in the product, will it still have a strong value proposition (e.g. Twitter, Dropbox, Instagram, Google, etc.)?
- Whose lunch/business will the startup be eating if the product is wildly successful?
- Does it sound silly or stupid for most people early on (e.g. “Friendster for college students”,”Snapchat is for sexting”, etc.?
- Are the founders exceptional at recruiting and are all of their friends dying to work for them?
