Founders love an idea way before they’ve worked out if they can even build the thing! Demand just tells you people want it, but feasibility is the harder question. Can you make it, price it, get it regulated, and still have a business when the dust settles?
You can have a queue of customers out the door and still lose money on every unit you sell. You can have the better product and watch it rot in an approvals queue for two years while someone else eats your lunch.
No one wants to think about this part, because well, it’s boring.It’s also the part that decides whether your idea makes it or dies.
Peter Deans calls this section of the Startup Toolkit: A Step-by-Step Guide for Founders “the devil is in the detail,” and the point is exactly that. The idea is the easy part. The detail is where startups quietly come undone. Here are the seven questions worth sitting with before you commit real money.
1. Can you actually make it?
Is it technically and operationally possible to build or deliver this product or service, with the tools, skills and suppliers at your disposal? Plenty of good ideas are perfectly sound on paper, but fall apart the moment you try to produce them. Answer this honestly before anything else, because every other question assumes the answer is yes.
2. Can you make it at scale?
A product you can hand-build in your kitchen is a very different proposition to one a factory has to turn out in volume, consistently, without quality slipping. The jump from one unit to ten thousand is where a lot of founders discover their process doesn’t hold. If you can’t see a path to producing this at the volume your numbers depend on, you don’t have a business yet. You have a prototype (which is also very necessary!)
3. Will the price cover the cost?
What’s your estimated unit sale price, and will it actually cover what each unit costs you to make and deliver? It sounds obvious written down. It’s astonishing how many founders build the whole thing before running that single line, then find out the price the market will bear sits below the cost of production. If the maths doesn’t work at the unit level, it doesn’t work at any level. No amount of volume fixes a product that loses money on every sale.
4. How long do the approvals take?
What legal, regulatory or compliance approvals does your product or service need, and, the part people skip, how long will they take? Approvals aren’t just a box to tick. They’re time. Sometimes years of it, and time is the one resource a startup can’t raise more of. A brilliant product stuck in a certification queue is burning runway the whole time it waits. Find out the timeline before you build the plan around it, not after.
5. How will competitors respond?
When your product hits the market, what will the existing players do? Established competitors have resources you don’t. They can cut prices, copy your best feature, or lean on relationships they’ve spent years building. Assuming they’ll simply let you take their customers is the kind of optimism that ruins businesses. Plan for the response, not the silence.
6. Could someone copy you straight away?
Is there a real risk that a similar product launches shortly after yours, from someone bigger and faster? Being first is an advantage, but can you hold the lead? If your idea is easy to replicate and you’ve no way to defend it, whether through IP, a head start, a brand, or something a competitor can’t easily buy, then first to market just means first to do the expensive work of educating the customer for everyone else. Tread lightly here and know what actually protects you.
7. What share can you realistically win?
What market share can you genuinely achieve in your first year or two? Not the fantasy “we only need 1% of a huge market” line every pitch deck leans on. A grounded number, built from how you’ll actually reach people and how many of them will actually switch. Your revenue forecast, your funding needs and your whole plan sit on top of this figure. Sit with the uncomfortable answers to protect your figures and remain realistic.
The temptation with a list like this is to skim it, tell yourself the answers are probably fine, and get back to the exciting part. Don’t. The value is in the questions that make you wince, because those are the ones pointing at the thing most likely to break.
None of this is meant to talk you out of your idea. Developing a commercially viable product is an iterative process, and working through these questions early is how a rough idea becomes something that survives. Better to find the weak point now, at the notebook stage, than eighteen months and a lot of money later.
Want the full picture? The feasibility questions sit in The Idea section of the Startup Toolkit: A Step-by-Step Guide for Founders, alongside market research, developing your idea and building your prototype. Or grab the Startup Bundle and get the book plus the Cash Flow Forecast template, so you can pressure-test the unit economics the moment you’ve answered question three.
