The Founder's Attack-Surface Checklist

The Founder's Attack-Surface Checklist: run an opponent on your own idea
An Ena Pragma method. Time: ~30 minutes, honestly done. Works on any new
company or product idea, before you commit real time or money.

WHY THIS EXISTS
Every idea-validation technique is one you run on yourself, and you are the
person who most wants the answer to be yes. This checklist borrows the questions
a hostile-but-fair outsider would ask, so the idea meets an opponent before it
meets the market. It does not predict whether you will succeed; startup outcomes
are a power law and no honest tool claims otherwise. It surfaces how this idea
dies, and forces you to price each risk against a real base rate.

HOW TO RUN IT (the discipline is half the value)
1. State the idea in one sentence, then set your own opinion aside. You are not
   defending it now; you are trying to kill it.
2. Run it as a pre-mortem (Gary Klein, HBR 2007): assume it is 18 months later
   and the company has failed. Use the seven modes below to explain why.
3. Answer each disconfirming question with evidence, not conviction. "I believe"
   is not an answer. "Five customers told me, unprompted" is.
4. Write the flip-conditions BEFORE you finish: the one or two facts that would
   make you walk away. Pre-commit to them. An idea you will not kill under any
   evidence is being defended, not tested.
5. Where the honest answer is "I cannot tell from here," say so and name the
   cheapest experiment that resolves it. A coin-flip you can name beats a
   confident score you cannot trust.

THE SEVEN WAYS IT DIES (base rate, the question, the flip-condition)

1. NO ONE NEEDS IT ENOUGH
   Base rate: poor product-market fit, cited in ~43% of recent failures
   (CB Insights). The old "no market need, 42%" is the 2014 version of this.
   Ask: who has this problem so badly they already built a workaround? Name
   five who would describe it unprompted.
   Flips to KILL unless: you can find real people actively working around it.

2. YOU RUN OUT OF MONEY BEFORE IT WORKS
   Base rate: running out of capital appears in ~70% of recent failures, usually
   the symptom, not the disease.
   Ask: what has to be true for your runway to outlast the bet, and what is the
   plan if the milestone slips six months?
   Flips to PIVOT unless: the critical milestone fits inside the money you can
   actually raise or fund.

3. THE UNIT MATH NEVER CLOSES
   Base rate: unsustainable unit economics, ~19% of recent failures.
   Ask: cost to acquire one paying customer, their lifetime value, and the price
   at which the second clears the first?
   Flips to KILL unless: there is a plausible price where lifetime value beats
   acquisition cost without heroic assumptions.

4. SOMEONE ALREADY DOES IT (OR "NOTHING" DOES)
   "No competitors" almost always means you did not look. Indirect competitors,
   manual workarounds, spreadsheets, and doing nothing all count. Nothing is free.
   Ask: what is the good-enough workaround today, and why is switching worth its
   cost to the buyer?
   Flips to PIVOT unless: switching from the status quo is clearly worth it to the
   buyer, not just to you.

5. YOU HIT A WALL
   Regulatory, legal, or technical walls: rarer, often fatal, concentrated in
   health, finance, and hard tech.
   Ask: what licensing, compliance, or feasibility requirement sits between you
   and your first real customer, confirmed by someone not selling you optimism?
   Flips to KILL unless: the wall is confirmed passable on your timeline and budget.

6. THE TIMING IS WRONG
   Base rate: bad timing, ~29% of recent failures. Too early educates a market
   that buys from someone else; too late and the window is closed.
   Ask: why now? What changed in the world to make this possible or necessary
   today that was not true three years ago?
   Flips to PIVOT unless: there is a specific, recent change that opens the window.

7. YOU BELIEVED YOUR OWN PITCH
   The one under all the others. About half of new US businesses are gone within
   five years (BLS); roughly three quarters of venture-backed companies never
   return investors' capital (Ghosh, HBS); 65% of financings return less than 1x
   (Correlation Ventures, 2004-2013).
   Ask: before anything specific about your idea, what is the honest prior for your
   reference class, and what about yours actually beats it?
   Flips to KILL unless: you can name a specific, evidenced reason you beat the
   base rate.

READING YOUR RESULT
Count the modes that flipped. A KILL you cannot answer with evidence is a stop,
not a detail to fix later. Two or more PIVOTs is a signal the idea in its current
form is not the one to build. Zero flips does not mean "go"; it means the idea
survived the questions you could answer from your desk, and the next move is the
cheapest real-world test of the assumption you are least sure of.

THE HONEST RULE
This is a rigor-forcing, risk-surfacing tool, not a fortune-teller. Its job is to
make sure you are not the turkey who mistook an absence of bad news for good news.
If the honest verdict is "genuine coin-flip," that is a real answer, and a more
trustworthy one than any score that sounds more certain than the evidence is.