Daniel AndorProduct Design Expert | Founder, Durran · Founder @ Durran | Structured Product Design that drives activation & retention

Navigating the Startup Journey: Introducing the Startup Assessment Board for Early-Stage Founders

1 Mar 2023 · 2 min

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2:21

In this video, the presenter walks through a Startup Stages template (the Startup Assessment Board) designed for early‑stage founders. The board is divided into four main blocks: Intro, Problem‑Solution Fit, Problem‑Market Fit, and Scale. The Intro captures basic startup data (name, team, UVP, problem definition, target market). The Problem‑Solution Fit block ensures the problem is worth solving by documenting problem validation (identified problems, target audience, early adopters, competitors, research) and solution validation (early adopters, solution testing). It also includes a “blockers” section for current obstacles and a “next steps” to‑do list. The Problem‑Market Fit block focuses on the MVP: features, pricing model, validated features, problems solved, user flow, clickable prototype, testing approach, and go‑to‑market strategy. The Scale block (not detailed) outlines future growth plans. The presenter invites viewers to request the PDF or board copy.

Chapters

Hi, this is an overview of the Startup Stages template. As you see straight at the top, we have the main building blocks of the template. It's Intro, Problem-Solution Fit, Problem-Market Fit, and Scale. For Intro, it's the basic information about a startup: startup name, team members, unique value proposition, problem definition, and target market. For Problem-Solution Fit, we want to make sure that we have a problem that's worth solving, so we check things like problem validation, solution validation. Under problem validation, you can see stuff like the problems you identify, the target audience that you want to talk to, the early adopters, the competitors, and researches that were done. Below, as you see with red, it's the blockers that you might have, and it's everything that you don't know how to do or everything that you don't have at the moment. So whatever blockers, it goes in there, and next steps, it's almost like a to-do list. For solution validation, you move forward with the early adopters and you try to validate the possible solution that you might have. After that, we have a stage for a check-in. It's like research is done, and there you map out the research that you've done so far and what were the insights or the learnings that you had acquired from these. Moving to the problem-market fit, we start to talk about the MVP. So it's like what features go inside of the MVP, what kind of pricing model you want to have, what features were validated and how were validated, what kind of problems you solved. The next step is about user flow, how the users will walk through your MVP and what are the main steps inside of that flow. The prototype that you should create is like clickable dummy that you want to test, how you want to test and what you learn from that. how you want to build your MVP and how you validate your MVP and how you go to the market. The next step that we didn't really cover because it wasn't in our scope, it's about scale. So it's like next steps and how you plan to scale or grow your business. Kind of that's it. Let me know what you think, and eventually if you want the PDF or the board, just leave a message or send over a comment or whatsoever. Thanks.