Starting a Business Playbook
In 30 days: your runway and true weekly cost counted, 20 problem interviews scored on one sheet, a priced offer in front of the best of them, and a count of who paid a deposit. A go, change or kill verdict that costs you a month, not a year and your savings.
A paid-or-killed verdict on your own numbers, before you quit the job or spend the savings.
What’s Inside
- The Founder Path: Pick, Prove, Price, Pre-sell, Hand-off, each with an exit test you can check yourself
- Runway and true weekly cost, with the guess-then-count calibration step
- The founder filter and the 4-question market filter, plus 8 reasons to kill an idea now
- The Last Time Interview: 5 rules, 5 questions, and the Interview Scorecard
- The offer build in 5 steps, the value check, and refund math for any guarantee
- The deposit test: your own go, change and kill lines, written before you ask
- The Founder Setup Checklist by stage, and the 5 questions to bring to an accountant and an attorney
- 4 worked composites, 1 that went wrong. Decisions shown, no results claimed
- 12 templates, 17 worksheets, a weekly tracker and founder-numbers.xlsx with the arithmetic built in
- Appendix of dated facts (checked October 2026): EIN steps, BOI status, payment fees. 6 AI prompts
The Problem
Most new founders build first and ask last. Building feels like progress. Asking feels like risk, because the answer can be no.
The public post-mortems point the same way. In CB Insights' 2014 study of 101 failed startups, mostly tech, the top 2 reasons were no market need and running out of cash. This book tests the first before you build, and measures the second before you start.
Interest is not payment. Twenty people saying yes is not twenty people buying.
The Founder Path
- Pick: one problem for one kind of buyer, after checking yourself and the market (pain, money, reach, growth).
- Prove: 20 interviews about the last time the problem happened, scored the same day against a go line you wrote first.
- Price: an offer built from their problems, priced above your floor, with the refund math done on any guarantee.
- Pre-sell: the offer to your warmest 20, with a refundable deposit to hold a place.
- Hand-off: go, change or kill, read against your own lines. On a go, the First 100 Customers Guide takes over.
What's in the Book
- Part 1, The Quick Win: 1 sentence, 5 people, today. Free to read.
- Part 2, Before Day One: runway in weeks and true weekly cost, guess first, then count.
- Part 3, Why New Businesses Fail: what the BLS survival data and the CB Insights study do and do not say.
- Part 4, The Founder Path: the 5 stages, their exit tests, and the 30-day sprint.
- Part 5, Pick: the founder filter, the market filter, narrowing the buyer, 8 reasons to kill now.
- Part 6, Prove: the Last Time Interview, the 4 problem buckets, solving for volume, the go line and the Interview Scorecard.
- Part 7, Price: the 5-step offer build, the value equation check, floor and value, gross profit, guarantees and refund math, honest scarcity, the 1-page offer.
- Part 8, Pre-sell: the deposit test, the ask, the log, and reading the gap between yes and paid.
- Part 9, The Verdict: go, change or kill, and the hand-off.
- Part 10, Set Up the Business: what to set up while testing, at the first deposit, and at a go verdict.
- Then: 4 worked composites (1 that went wrong), the 30-Day Founder Scorecard and 12 templates, 5 metrics, 12 common mistakes, the 30 and 90 day look-back, proof, and 2 appendices.
A Sample: What a Guarantee Really Costs
A hypothetical deck stain business charges $1,200 a job. Delivery costs $500, so gross profit is $700. A full refund guarantee loses the $1,200 and the $500 already spent: $1,700 a claim. If 1 buyer in 10 claims, that is $170 per job sold, about 24% of gross profit. A "we redo it if you followed the care sheet" guarantee costs $500 a claim, $50 per job, about 7%. Every number is a round hypothetical. The book shows you how to run it on yours.
Questions
Does it promise me customers? No. It gives you a verdict you can trust, from your own counts. Nobody who has not met your market can promise you a customer count.
Does it tell me what score or how many deposits means go? No. You write your own lines before you see the count, so the line cannot move to fit the answer.
Is it legal or tax advice? No. Part 10 lists the 5 questions to bring to an accountant and an attorney. Fees and filing facts sit in a dated appendix.
What happens after a go? The First 100 Customers Guide picks up: outreach, first-customer pricing, referrals and which channels to open, in order.
Who This Is For
Someone with a business idea for a local service or small service business who has not sold anything yet, or has sold only to friends, and wants to find out cheaply whether strangers will pay before quitting a job or spending savings.
Read it in your library.
This is included with The Standard, along with every other guide in the library. Your monthly re-audit tells you which one to open next. $497 to start, $297/mo to keep it running. Cancel any month and keep everything.
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