Uncover Material Economic Contradictions and Risks
The founder scrutinises the economic model for internal logical contradictions, unsupported leap-of-faith assumptions, and existential financial risks. They explicitly document where customer willingness-to-pay clashes with cost-to-deliver or where acquisition channels fail to scale affordably.
Completing this action exposes critical vulnerabilities, flawed logic, and blind spots in the economic model before capital is committed. It protects the venture from scaling a fundamentally unit-uneconomic business model into market expansion.
The founder must produce a formal Risk and Contradiction Register detailing unverified economic assumptions, sensitivity red flags, and structural margin vulnerabilities. Each risk must be ranked by financial severity and likelihood.
Five questions an expert would ask when reviewing your output
Use these to challenge assumptions, pressure-test your logic, and check the quality of this action's output in the context of the parent task and wider venture development.
- 1
What internal contradictions exist between your high-touch sales model and your low-margin pricing tier?
- 2
Where does your willingness-to-pay evidence directly conflict with your projected customer lifetime duration?
- 3
Which single unverified unit cost assumption poses the greatest risk to achieving venture-scale profit margins?
- 4
How have you accounted for hidden customer success and retention costs in your gross margin assumptions?
- 5
Why does your model assume marketing efficiency improves at scale when historical channel data indicates rising acquisition costs?