Any idea for a product or service should be accompanied by dozens of assumptions. These assumptions are things that need to be true in order for someone to become a customer of your product or service. To understand your prospective customers, you need to know what needs to be true about how they think and act, what they are capable of, and how they make decisions. And there are things that need to be true about how you will produce your product or service, which resources, partners, and activities are crucial to your production process, and how you will make potential customers to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase your product or service.

If you are starting with just an idea, many of your assumptions will seem like wild guesses. That’s OK. The main point is that you must explicitly identify your assumptions in order to be able to evaluate and validate them with rigor. Another important point to remember is that customers are already doing X, Y, or Z to solve their problem, however inefficiently or expensively those solutions might be. Your job is to laser in on the attributes of what they are currently doing/using to build desired features and benefits (and therefore a full set of assumptions to test) that will cause them to switch to your offering.