leave with: one bounded experiment with an owner and a decision rule
allow: 45 minutes
eight questions · 45 minutes · no email or sign-in
download the illustrated workbook ↓
start your readiness check
this check is for south african founders testing an idea or deciding the next step for an existing technology startup. work alone or with your co-founder; you do not need revenue, a polished deck or an application to lab2sky to use it.
- gather: your customer notes, product observations and any dated revenue or cost evidence you already have.
- check: answer the eight questions below. label each important claim observed, estimated or unknown.
- decide: choose one uncertainty to test. name the owner, cost limit, review date and result that would support continuing, changing or stopping.
use your own notes or the free worksheet. no email or sign-in is required to read or download it; the document does not send your answers to lab2sky.
use it before the next commitment
work through this with your co-founder or the person responsible for the next milestone. for each question, record what you know, its date, the source and what would change your mind. mark it as observed, estimated or unknown. an early-stage business should have unknowns; hiding them makes the decision harder.
this is a preparation tool, not a score or an investment threshold. a completed checklist does not establish that a company is ready for funding.
eight questions worth answering
- customer: who experiences the problem, when did it last happen and what did they do about it?
- impact: what would improve compared with that current approach, for whom, and how could you measure the difference?
- access: can you reach a specific group to test the idea? distinguish a possible introduction from agreed permission to run a pilot.
- product: what is the smallest useful result you can deliver? what must work reliably for a customer to trust it?
- revenue: who pays, what would bring them back and what does delivery cost? separate evidence from the model you hope to build.
- international potential: which other market has the same need, and which parts of your first-market advantage might not travel?
- people: who owns the next decisions, what relevant work have they done and where is help needed?
- next commitment: what decision will the next test inform, what resources does it require and what result would make you stop or change course?
match the evidence to your stage
build: bring a defined problem, an initial customer observation and a testable hypothesis. revenue is not required to begin the conversation.
accelerate: show your product or meaningful validation, the constraint you face and what improvement would matter. customer behaviour is more useful than a list of activities.
series a: support the growth case with dated operating evidence. explain retention, revenue quality, distribution, cash needs and the next market. describe inconsistencies rather than smoothing them out.
what to do after the check
if your customer problem still needs validation, explore venture building for south african startups. if you have a product or meaningful validation and a specific obstacle, explore startup acceleration in south africa. if you have dated evidence of repeatable demand and a substantiated growth case, read our series a readiness and investment approach.
bring the evidence and the open question to an introduction. completing this check is not a funding assessment, an acceptance decision or a promise of investment.
turn an uncertainty into a decision
suppose a team believes that maintenance managers will pay for fewer unplanned stoppages. “customers like our dashboard” does not resolve that hypothesis. a better test identifies a specific equipment class, an agreed baseline, the person who can authorise a pilot and what an improvement would be worth to the buyer.
this is an illustrative example, not a lab2sky portfolio case. choose a test that can disprove your assumption. record the cost and time limit before starting, then compare what happened with the decision rule you agreed.
a working example: an alert is not yet an outcome
worked example · illustrative
a fictional cold-chain team wants to reduce spoilage. six discovery conversations suggest dispatchers sometimes hear about temperature exceptions too late. that supports a question about response time; it does not yet prove that the product reduces waste. the team first tests whether authorised dispatchers can receive and act on useful alerts during ten routes.
what this changes: the next decision is whether to run a paid follow-on pilot, not whether to launch nationally. the baseline, route sample, cost cap and response-time measure belong in the test brief before the pilot starts.
put it to work
allow: 45 minutes
leave with: one bounded experiment with an owner and a decision rule
- write your customer problem without naming your technology. identify the user, buyer and existing workaround.
- label the three most important claims observed, estimated or unknown. add a source and date to each observation.
- choose the weakest assumption with the largest effect on the next commitment. define a test, owner, cost limit and review date.
- write the result that supports continuing, changing or stopping. include what would make the test inconclusive.
these are lab2sky’s working questions and assessment approach. examples are illustrative unless explicitly identified otherwise. how we write our guides