Business brainstorm framework
the user's serial-founder filter. Run an idea through each dimension. Verdict per dimension: ✅ strong / 🟡 OK / ❌ weak / ❓ unknown — needs research.
1. Problem
Is the pain real, frequent, and acute?
- ✅ Strong: People are already paying for half-solutions, building workarounds, or complaining publicly. Quantifiable cost (time / money / risk).
- 🟡 OK: Real pain, but mild or rare.
- ❌ Weak: "It would be nice if…" — vitamin, not painkiller.
2. Audience
Who has this problem, and can the user reach them?
- ✅ Strong: Audience the user already talks to (SaaS founders, technical marketers, agency owners) OR a tight niche they can break into cheaply.
- 🟡 OK: Adjacent audience — would take work but feasible.
- ❌ Weak: Cold audience with no existing access (e.g., enterprise CIOs).
Check: is this audience already in one of your existing property reaches? If yes, distribution is half-solved.
3. Wedge
How do you get the first 100 customers?
- ✅ Strong: Clear, concrete first-customer playbook. "I'd email 50 founders I know," "I'd post on r/SaaS," "I'd add this to my newsletter thank-you page."
- 🟡 OK: Plausible path but needs a few experiments.
- ❌ Weak: "We'll do paid ads" / "We'll do SEO" — too vague, too long-tail.
4. Monetization
Who pays, how much, how often?
- ✅ Strong: Clear price band ($20 / $50 / $200 / $2k MRR), known willingness to pay (proven by competitors charging similar), recurring or repeated revenue.
- 🟡 OK: Reasonable price assumption but unproven.
- ❌ Weak: Free-with-ads, or "we'll figure out monetization later."
5. Moat
Why is this hard to copy? Why won't bigger players crush it?
- ✅ Strong: Distribution advantage (the user's audience), brand-as-moat (their name), or compounding asset (data, network effect, content corpus).
- 🟡 OK: Some defensibility (speed, focus, design taste).
- ❌ Weak: Pure execution play any well-funded team could replicate in 6 months.
Note: the user's moats are usually audience + voice + speed, not tech. Honest scoring.
6. Portfolio fit
Does this complement or cannibalize the existing 6 properties?
- ✅ Complements: Audience overlap that boosts existing properties (e.g., a tool for one of your existing audiences that drives newsletter subs).
- 🟡 Neutral: Different audience, no interference.
- ❌ Cannibalizes: Competes with an existing property for attention, splits the audience, or muddies positioning. Or it's so similar to an existing property it should be a feature, not a standalone.
Check memory's project_*.md files — does this idea overlap with any in-flight projects? If yes, ask: should this be a feature of one of those?
7. Distribution
Which of the user's audience assets can launch this?
- ✅ Strong: Direct fit with your existing newsletter, blog, podcast, product users, or social following.
- 🟡 OK: Adjacent audience — could launch with partner collabs or paid push.
- ❌ Weak: Requires building a new audience from zero. (Possible but slow — usually means it should wait until an existing property reaches it.)
8. Energy fit
Does the user actually want to build and run this for 2+ years?
- ✅ Strong: Genuinely interested, plays to strengths (writing, marketing, design taste, audience), and isn't already burned out on the space.
- 🟡 OK: Interesting but not exciting. Probably needs a co-founder or strong operator.
- ❌ Weak: Interesting on paper, dread in the gut. Pass.
INTJ honesty: if it requires constant context-switching, heavy sales motion, or babysitting customers — flag the energy cost.
9. Opportunity cost
What does the user NOT do if they do this?
- ✅ Strong: Marginal capacity used (e.g., 4 hrs/week of the user + Claude). Doesn't crowd out existing businesses or in-flight builds.
- 🟡 OK: Real time investment but bounded.
- ❌ Weak: Would require pulling focus from an existing business, slowing a live property, or pausing other in-flight projects.
The honest test: would adding this make the user less effective on the things that are already working? If yes, the bar is much higher.
Scoring rubric → Verdict
Sum the verdicts:
- 5+ ✅ and no ❌ on Problem / Audience / Distribution / Energy → Build (those four are non-negotiable)
- 3–4 ✅ with 1–2 ❌ → Sleep on it (revisit in 30 days; sometimes ideas mature)
- ❌ on Problem OR Energy → Pass (no point fighting these)
- ❌ on Portfolio fit (cannibalizes) → Steal an angle for the existing property instead of building new
- 3+ ❓ (unknowns) → run /deep-research first, then re-score
Iterate me
This filter is a starting point. Refine the weights and add dimensions as the user learns what actually predicted their own wins/losses. Especially: revisit after the next 2–3 brainstorms to see if any dimension was a load-bearing miss.