A ten-minute venture audit — seven questions, one priority, two or three moves. theventurestack.org
Promise oneThese questions are seeds, not a quiz. "I don't know yet" is a good answer — it scores better than a vague one, and it tells you where to point the next experiment.
Promise twoYou'll leave this page with two or three take-away moves — never more. One experiment is the anchor; the rest just clear its path.
Haven't launched yet?You're not an edge case — most people doing this haven't. Questions 5 and 6 have a smaller version underneath them. Delivery and Capture are where ventures die, and both are testable before you ship. Only the evidence changes; the layer never waits.
The rule
Test the assumption whose failure would most change the venture, whose evidence is weakest, and whose answer you can afford to get.
It's usually lower in the stack than the one you want to work on. And you don't need to be 10x anything to be here — most first ventures win on presence and reliability. This audit's job is to make playing cheap, not to gatekeep entry.
No venture yet — or the last idea just died? Don't go away and think harder. Write three columns, fast, no editing: what you know · who you can reach · what you can spend. The middle column is your first interview list — twelve names means you have a scheduling problem, not an access problem. Pick two, contact them this week, then come back here. (What you have tells you where to look; it never tells you what's true — that's what the rest of this is for.)
⚑ Bedrock Flag. Your Layer 0 answer needs attention before any answer above it can be trusted. This isn't a verdict on whether you should play — it's the first thing to fix so you can keep playing.
Four ways ventures fool themselves — check any that feel familiar
THIS WEEK — your audit result
Answer the seven questions to find your priority.
Two smaller moves that clear the experiment's path (optional — and stop at two)
One layer, one assumption, one experiment, one week. If you wrote more than three things down, cross some out — a to-do list is how frameworks become theater.