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A questionnaire to help completely describe a new business/product idea to a potential cofounder/investor for evaluation.
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NewBusinessQuestionnaire.md

New Product / Business Idea Questionnaire

Why Does This Exist ?

You are extremely enthusiastic (and rightfully so) about a new product or business idea that you have. Or maybe someone approaching you is (but I'm going to assume that you're the one with the idea for simplicity). You want to bring a cofounder (or an investor) onboard. This can involve a lot of back and forth calls and/or emails that takes up a lot of time. To help paint a clear picture about your product/business idea, here is a questionnaire you can fill up and share with your potential cofounder/investor. It might even make you see things more clearly!

Feel free to copy/link to this page! The contents are released under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or later, a copy of which can be found here. Feel free to suggest changes. I plan to add/remove things over time to keep this document as useful as possible.

The Questionnaire

Product Summary and Composition

  1. Summarize the product in one paragraph. What is your motivation behind building the product ?

  2. What are the business/product's main components that need building or setting up (examples: app, website, retail store, etc) ?

  3. How can each of the components be made or designed ?

  4. Why are each of the above components necessary ?

  5. Describe how/if each of the above components can be eliminated while still keeping the business viable/profitable.

  6. Describe how/if each of the above components can be outsourced (from where ?)

Target Audience

  1. Who is the target audience(es) of the product ? What is their number ?

  2. How does the product create value to the target audience(es) ?

Competition

  1. Who is the competition (if any) ?

  2. Who is the potential (or even indirect) competition ?

  3. How is the product/business better than the competition ?

Risks

  1. What are the associated risks involved in developing (and then running) the product/business ?

  2. Describe a mitigation plan for each of the above risks. Can you think of ways to eliminate each of them completely ?

Expenses, Funding and Monetization

  1. What is the initial investment required in building the product ? What is the operational cost once the product is built ? Detail each expense (examples: web hosting, employee salaries, insurance, office rent, etc).

  2. What is the initial burn rate and its duration before the product makes enough money to sustain itself ?

  3. What is the basic monetization plan ? List the unit operations that can generate profit (example: buying a product in an e-commerce site), their expected frequencies, cost to the company per such operation, the revenue per operation as well as the baseline expenses (salaries, web hosting, etc).

  4. What is the net turnover (profit after all expenses) you expect in various time intervals ? Include 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 6th months, and then 1st, 2nd and 3rd years to begin with along with other time intervals you think are significant.

  5. How do you plan to finance the product/business ? Would external funding need to be raised ? How much ?

  6. If short on funds, how would you shrink the scope of the product while still making money ? Can you balance between higher building expense vs higher running expense (example: outsourced SaaS software costs more money to run but no money to build) to better help with the cash flow situation ?

Marketing

  1. How would you market the product/business to the target audience(es) ? What would this cost ?

  2. If you had lesser marketing budget but still want to maximize reach, how would you market differently ?

  3. If you had a higher marketing budget, do you think the time to profitability can be reduced by reducing the time to reach the critical mass of operations (discussed in previous section) needed to sustain the product/business ?

Growth and Expansion

  1. Describe the path to sustainability (including expected timelines). Include optimistic, pessimistic and averaged estimates.

  2. Once sustainable, how would the business would grow further ? Again include optimistic, pessimistic and averaged estimates.

  3. What are some probable pivots of the idea once initial growth has been achieved (or maybe if it cannot be achieved due to some reason) ?

Human Resource Requirements

  1. Describe the various types of human resources you'd need to employ to run the business. For each type, include the number (with growth projections), skills, expected salaries, training expenses (the business would need to incur) and expected growth path (if any) of the resource during the course of their employement.

  2. How do you think the quantity of each of the above resources can be reduced ? For example, you could outsource, automate or just be more efficient and eliminate entire tasks.

  3. What is the organizational model the company would need to grow into ? What would it look like initially ? Assume you've managed to stay as lean as possible initially.

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