Turn your idea into a business.
Not just a side project.

A business is an idea plus someone who pays for it

The distance between "I have an idea" and "I have a business" is one question: who hands over money, and why. Everything else (the product, the brand, the stack, the launch) is downstream of that. Most ideas that die didn't fail because the product was bad. They failed because nobody had established, before building, that a specific group of people had a problem expensive enough to pay to remove.

"Everyone" is not a buyer. Neither is "small businesses" or "founders". A buyer is specific enough that you could name ten of them, say where they spend their time online, and describe what they currently do instead of using your product. If you can't do that, you don't yet have a business. You have a product concept, and the difference will show up the first time you try to sell something. Working out the ideal customer profile is the first real decision, and the jobs-to-be-done framework is the cleanest way to state what they're actually hiring the product to do.

The four money questions, in the order that matters

Every business idea answers the same four questions, whether the founder asks them or the market does. Ask them yourself and you get the answers in an afternoon. Let the market ask them and you get the answers after a year of runway.

1. Who pays? Not who uses it: who signs off on the spend. In B2B those are often different people, and the one with the budget cares about different things from the one with the problem. Name the payer before anything else.
2. For what pain? Rank the payer's problems by how often they happen and how much they hurt when they do. Only the ones near the top of both lists carry a budget. A problem people complain about but never spend money on is a conversation topic, not a market. The emotional friction states framework is one way to score that intensity honestly.
3. At what price? A price has to clear three bars at once: below what the pain costs the buyer, above what it costs you to serve and acquire them, and inside the range where the buyer believes the product is credible.
4. Through which channel? The cheapest repeatable route to the next hundred buyers. If none exists, the first three answers don't matter yet.

The order is the point. A price chosen before you know the payer is a guess. A channel chosen before you know the price may cost more per customer than any customer is worth. Founders who skip ahead usually skip the first question, because it is the one most likely to return an uncomfortable answer.

Price is a decision, not a discovery

Pricing is where most first-time founders lose the most money, and they lose it by going too low. Underpricing doesn't just cut revenue. It signals low value, attracts the customers who complain most and churn fastest, and leaves you without the margin to reach anyone. Raising a price later is far harder than starting higher and discounting.

You can put real structure on this before you have a single customer. Van Westendorp price sensitivity gives you a defensible range from four questions rather than a number you picked because it felt right. Value-based pricing anchors that range to what the outcome is worth to the buyer instead of what the product cost you to make. The pricing strategy calculator turns the range into a model, and the pricing validation guide covers how to test it without a product.

The number has to survive the arithmetic, too. If it costs more to acquire a customer than they're worth over their lifetime, the business doesn't work at any volume. Growth just makes the hole bigger. That's what the CAC-to-LTV ratio tells you, and it's worth a rough estimate before you build rather than a precise one after. If you're choosing between a free tier and a paid-only launch, the freemium strategy page covers when giving it away actually pays.

Distribution is part of the idea, not a later problem

"Build it and they will come" has never been true, and it's less true now that building is cheap and the number of things being built has gone up accordingly. How you reach the buyer is a design constraint on the business, not a marketing task you pick up after launch. An idea whose only viable channel is paid ads you can't afford is a worse idea than one with an obvious community, search or partnership route, regardless of which product is better.

Ask it early: where does this buyer already look for a solution, and what would make them switch? If the honest answer is "they don't look, because they don't know they have this problem", you're funding education as well as a product, and that's a different and far more expensive business. The launch plan guide works through picking a channel you can actually sustain, and the GTM strategy framework lays out the motions to choose from.

Proof that someone will pay, before there is anything to buy

Compliments are free and pre-orders are not. The strongest early signal a business can get is a commitment that costs the buyer something: money, time, or reputation. A waitlist sign-up is weak. A deposit, a signed letter of intent, or a buyer introducing you to their boss is strong. Interviews are where you find out who might give you one, and the Mom Test is the method for asking about what people already did instead of what they say they will do. The customer interview guide turns it into a script.

A fake-door test is the cheapest version of that commitment: a page that describes the offer with a real price and a real buy button, measured before the product exists. ShipFit's seventh decision, Will They Pay?, designs one around your buyer and price so the first number you see is behaviour, not opinion.

How ShipFit turns these into decisions

ShipFit is a decision engine for the stretch between idea and build. You describe the idea in a sentence, and it walks you through nine forced decisions in a fixed order, each one checked against live market signal and a named framework. Each decision locks before the next one opens, so the price is set against a known buyer and the scope is cut to fit the price.

• Worth Building? A Ship, Pivot or Kill verdict on the market, with the reason.
• Who Pays? The buyer persona, stated specifically enough to go and find ten of them.
• What Hurts? The pains ranked by frequency and intensity, so you build for the ones that carry a budget.
• How to Win? The angle that holds against the alternatives the buyer already uses.
• What's V1? The smallest version that tests the money questions.
• How to Charge? The pricing model, entry price and tier structure.
• Will They Pay? The behavioural test that proves it before you build.
• How to Launch? The primary channel and the message for it.
• What to Export? A build-ready spec for the AI tool you'll build with.

A Quick Take covers the first decision in about 2 minutes. The full playbook takes 15 to 20 minutes. The free tier includes 3 credits a month, and paid playbooks start at $5. Read the full 9-step playbook for the method behind each step, start with a free idea score, or see pricing.