Tool 23 of 32 · a day
Market Reality
Whether the market can currently support the business at all, so a timing problem never gets misdiagnosed as an execution problem.
Opened at intake and the first leadership contact, so the reading is in hand well before decision day. Runs for companies still searching for a market, and wherever the Value-Source Audit finds no current value engine.
What it is for
To check whether the constraint is outside the building: whether the market can currently support the business, so a timing problem is not treated as an execution problem.
The failure it catches
For a company still searching for its market, every internal tool in this kit can read healthy and the verdict still be wrong, because no amount of internal fixing changes a market that is not there yet.
Why it works
Paying-or-sacrificing counts, two independent trend signals, and a trigger a stranger could watch for, convert conviction into evidence. An unfalsifiable belief that the market is about to turn is itself a reading.
How to run it
- Answer three questions from evidence rather than conviction.
- Demand now: is anyone currently paying, or measurably sacrificing time, data or switching cost, for this exact job to be done. Count them and name them.
- Trend: is the demand evidence growing, flat, or shrinking over the trailing twelve months, read from at least two independent signals. Search interest, category funding, competitor traction, regulatory movement, the company's own top of funnel.
- Trigger: what specific, observable external event or number would mark the market as ready, something a stranger could watch for. If no trigger can be named, the belief is unfalsifiable, and it reads as such.
- Walk the last person who almost paid. What stopped them. Who solved this job last quarter without you, and what did it cost them.
How to read the result
A paying-or-sacrificing count near zero plus a flat or shrinking trend means the market cannot currently support the business, no matter how good the internals are. A nameable trigger converts not yet into a measurable waiting position, and it becomes the written re-entry conditions a Wait verdict ships with. No nameable trigger converts not yet into a wind-down conversation.
How to run it well
- Founder conviction is not demand evidence. Measurable sacrifice is.
- Use at least two independent signals for the trend. A single favorable source is shopping.
Where it breaks
- Founder conviction is not demand evidence; measurable sacrifice is.
- Reading the trend from a single favorable source is shopping.
- A trigger a stranger cannot observe makes the re-entry conditions unfalsifiable, which turns a Wait verdict into indefinite hope.
What would prove it wrong
A not-yet market where a comparable entrant then succeeds inside the window without the named trigger firing would mean the demand questions under-detect reachable demand.
What we watch
Whether not-yet readings with no stranger-observable trigger stay not-yet, and whether named triggers that fire actually mark a market that can then support the business.
Ask yourself
- Who currently pays, or measurably sacrifices time, data, or switching cost, for this exact job to be done? Count them. Name them.
- Over the trailing twelve months, is that demand evidence growing, flat, or shrinking, on two independent signals?
- What specific, observable external event or number would mark this market as ready, something a stranger could watch for?
- If the market were ready today, what number would already look different?
- Who solved this job last quarter without you, and what did it cost them?
Fed by: Value-Source Audit
Feeds: Savability Test