If you are going from [[essays/-1 to 0|-1 to 0]] and want to build a venture-scale startup, this is a framework on how to proceed. 1. Pick a north star Some domain, insight or value you are increasingly passionate about. Ideally you have experience and some unfair advantage. You can always change to a new one later. 2. Find problems that are reachable today (or in the near-future) within your north star These are proxy markets to your north star market. They allow you to start learning and build a business. You should spend a full day coming up with ideas. [[Quantity produces quality]]. Do the math. If you can't find a plausible near-future market where your idea could become a billion dollar company, the best outcome is probably a cash flow business. 3. Develop hypotheses If you're going for a venture-scale idea, you need to be a worldbuilder. A worldbuilder imagines a future world and puts in the work that gets us there. Imagining a future world means having hypotheses - having opinions on how the world works and testing those opinions. The validation stage is about validating hypotheses. Trying to validate your startup idea without clear hypotheses is a great way to waste time. Good hypotheses don't fall from trees, they usually emerge from real work: Prototyping, writing, experiments. 4. Test your hypotheses There are two ways to test hypotheses for startup ideas: the demo and the memo. The demo is a bottom-up approach, creating user-facing content to test with real people. A demo can be a landing page, product video/images, working MVP or a [[Painted door test]] The memo is a top-down written argument about the market and strategy. Doing the research and writing it down makes it easy to spot muddled ideas. [[Why write]]. Technical founders often find the memo unnatural. Making it an intentional exercise can help. Being a worldbuilder means validating through both demo and memo. 5. Find community Figuring out what do next can be overwhelming and isolating. A community can make the process more enjoyable and efficient - especially if it contains other curious, intense and opinionated people. Great examples are [South Park Commons](https://www.southparkcommons.com/) and [Nine Three Quarters](https://www.ninethreequarters.com/). 6. Commit to the process If you keep taking on increasingly ambitious hypotheses and do real work, you will eventually build [[Conviction]]. Conviction is what gets you out of the -1 to 0 stage - with conviction you are in the 0 to 1 stage. You have conviction if you can bet the next 5 years of your life on the idea and it fails, and you would still feel good about the bet. ![[Pasted image 20251208171619.png]] [^1] [^1]: South Park Commons. 2024. “How to Go from -1 to 0.” January 31. [https://blog.southparkcommons.com/how-to-go-from-minus-1-to-0/](https://blog.southparkcommons.com/how-to-go-from-minus-1-to-0/). [[HowGo12024|Annotations]]