Ideate: how we find out whether a problem is real before anything gets built

Every product we've built started as a sentence somebody believed. otlo started as "community builders build on rented land". apprn started as "in a salon, money leaks where nothing can be checked". A sentence like that feels like an insight to the person who wrote it. Ideate is the stage where it has to become evidence, or be dropped.

01What is the Ideate stage for?

Ideate is the first of six stages in Stuck-to-Scale, the method under everything we do. Each stage answers one question. Ideate's is the simplest to say and the hardest to answer honestly: is there a real problem worth solving here?

"Real" has a specific meaning. The problem happens to a particular kind of person, it happens often enough to matter, and it already costs them something: time, money, a customer, a good employee. "Worth solving" means someone would pay to make it stop, and a small team could build something that does.

Ideate is not naming, branding, choosing a stack or designing screens. Those are real decisions, and they belong to later stages. Made now, they give an unproven idea the look of a finished one, which makes it much harder to drop. A logo is the most expensive way to fall in love with a problem you haven't checked.

The stage produces three things: a problem statement in the buyer's own words, the evidence behind it, and a verdict.

02What does being stuck at Ideate look like?

Being stuck at Ideate rarely feels like being stuck. It feels like being busy. These are the signals we look for, and what they usually mean.

The third row is the one we see most. Across the products we've looked at, a build that keeps changing direction is rarely a build problem. It's a problem that was never pinned down, so the team is at Ideate on the ground while the plan says Build. Naming the real stage is the first thing we do, because the right work depends on it.

03What do we do at the Ideate stage?

In a Venture Diagnosis, Ideate is the first half of the work, and it runs in the same order every time.

1. Map what exists. What's been built, what's been tried, and what it taught you. We agree on the current state before anyone judges it, so the verdict rests on facts both sides accept.
2. Find the workaround. It's the most useful evidence there is: a spreadsheet, a group chat, a person whose job it has quietly become. Then we ask what it costs, in hours, money and people.
3. Place the pain on a ladder. Mentioned, complained about, worked around, paid for, switched for. Each rung is stronger evidence than the one below it. It's our adaptation of Jobs-to-be-Done thinking, and we set it out in full in Is it worth building?
4. List the assumptions. Every idea rests on them. We write them all down and mark the three that kill the venture if they're wrong. Those three become the first things to test, and nothing else competes with them.
5. Decide. The verdict is build, test first, or stop, with reasoning you can check line by line.

We make these calls in working sessions with the person who decides. Ideate goes wrong in committees, because a committee can always agree to keep exploring.

04How did Ideate go on our own ventures?

We run every method on our own ventures before we sell it. Here is what Ideate looked like for the two that are public.

otlo. The sentence was "community builders build on rented land". The evidence was the workaround. The people who run clubs, networks and collectives were running them on a group chat, a spreadsheet and an Instagram account. Group chats hit their limits and expose members' phone numbers. Reach on social platforms now has to be paid for. When an event ends, the ticketing tool hands over a list of emails and goes quiet, so every gathering starts from zero. The workaround was visible, and it was costing builders the relationship they'd done the work to create.

apprn. The sentence was "in a salon, money leaks where nothing can be checked". The evidence was in the disputes: commission arguments that cost an owner their best artist, services billed but never delivered, cash that goes missing. The workaround was trust, and trust was failing.

Neither sentence was proof on its own. Each became a venture because the workaround was visible and costly, and because we could name the person who would pay. Ideas that didn't reach that bar aren't on our site: we don't show ventures that are paused or haven't started.

05What does a good Ideate output look like?

One page. If it needs more, the problem isn't clear yet. It holds:

• the buyer, named precisely enough that you'd know where to find them;
• the problem in the buyer's words, not yours;
• the workaround, and what it costs;
• where the pain sits on the ladder, with the evidence for that rung;
• the three assumptions that kill it, and how each will be tested;
• the stop line: the result that would make you drop it, set before you look (our Kill Criteria framework sets out how);
• the verdict, with its reasoning.

06When do we say stop?

"Don't build it" is a legitimate verdict, and at Ideate it's the cheapest one you'll ever get. We say it when:

• nobody works around the problem today;
• the only enthusiasm comes from people who won't pay;
• the buyer has never agreed the problem exists;
• the assumptions that kill it can't be tested without building the whole thing.

A stop isn't a failure. It's a decision made early, with the money and the team still intact. Sometimes the verdict sits in between: test first. That means one small, cheap test of the riskiest assumption before any build, with the result that counts written down in advance.

When the evidence holds, the question changes. It's no longer "is this real?" but "what exactly are we building, for whom, and what are we leaving out?" That's the next stage, Define.

07Questions founders ask about Ideate