Every product is just a hypothesis until you test it

Here's something I believe: Every new product is just a hypothesis until you test it.

When founders are building new products, the most important steps are:

• To clearly define the opinionated hypothesis behind the product

• To test the components of that hypothesis, AQAP

Some founders do this intuitively.

In fact, I'd argue that most successful founders have developed this intuition to a great extent.

A few succeed despite not doing steps 1 and 2.

But most founders don't clearly identify and test their hypotheses, and as a result, they fail quickly or slowly.

I've personally seen this play out from working with 300+ teams over the past 20 years. In 90% of cases, looking back, it's clear whether they did steps 1 and 2 — and you can see how that affected their odds.

At Character Capital, we look for founders who already operate in this way. We call it "hypothesis-driven," and it's one of the criteria we score when evaluating potential investments.

But like a coach working with elite players, we also want to help the best in the world get better.

And if you're not working this way now, we've created a few methods you can use to start.

The Foundation Sprint and Design Sprint are our methods for helping founders build products that click with customers.

And we run these sprints almost every week with portfolio companies.

Want to see how we do it? Next month we're hosting a 2-day workshop in San Francisco where you can deep dive on the methods and run a full Foundation Sprint with our team.