SIMULATIONEVALUATING BUSINESS IDEAS

First Hundred.

You have a business idea, a small pile of research points, and limited time before you run out of money. Interview real potential users. Research your industry. Decide if your idea is a potential business.

  • 100
    research points to spend
  • 6
    people you can talk to
  • 1
    season before money runs out
Start customer discovery (100 pts) ↓or watch the 90-second explainer first →
  1. 1. Pick one of three ideas
  2. 2. Write a value hypothesis
  3. 3. Spend research points to break it
Watch first

How to play this simulation 

▶ LEARN BY PLAYING

A quick tour of the setup, your moves, and what you will learn

Section I

Choose your assignment

01

Name a narrow segment.

A specific beachhead — five people you could picture by name — beats a broad market every time. Vague targeting wastes moves and hides real signal.Vague: "small business owners who need better tools."
Beachhead: "solo bookkeepers in the US serving 5–15 e-commerce clients who still reconcile Shopify payouts in a spreadsheet."

02

Weigh behavior over opinions.

What people did last week is evidence. What they say they'd do is decoration. Score follows the story about a real purchase, not the compliment.

03

Hunt disconfirmation, then validate or pivot.

Points come from finding out where your segment or hypothesis breaks. Strong disconfirming evidence and an honest pivot scores as well as a validated bet.

Fig. 02 — What people say vs. what they do

Every research move gives you info that's somewhere between an opinion and real behavior. Your score only counts what people actually did.

How you're scored

Three things move your score 

Fig. 03 · Scoring
01 · Disconfirmation

Look for what's wrong

You earn the most points for evidence that challenges your hypothesis: the persona who won't pay, the segment already served, the workaround people won't drop. Compliments count for almost nothing.

02 · Evidence quality

Behavior beats opinion

Each move carries a weight. A story about the last time someone actually paid for a workaround scores far higher than a "yeah, I'd probably use that." Desk research supports, it doesn't substitute.

03 · Pivot discipline

Call it early, call it right

At the end you must validate or pivot. Pivoting on strong disconfirming evidence scores as well as validating on strong supporting evidence. Pushing forward on a broken hypothesis is the losing move.