Learn to Love the RAT!

Learn to love the RAT!

Whether you’re launching a new startup or a new product, many rush towards a minimum viable product (MVP)—and that’s a mistake.

Founders have big plans for their MVP! Oh, the features it will have! Did you see how fast search is? Look at that responsiveness! And the UX? So slick!

And the next thing you know, founders have spent much of their precious cash—the lifeblood of a startup—building a really cool looking app that does everything right except for one critical issue: it doesn’t solve the customer’s problem.

Now you’re stuck with a good looking app no one wants.

Don’t build MVPs yet! First, fall in love with the RAT!

The RAT is the Riskiest Assumption Test. The RAT asks you to list out your riskiest assumptions: the assumptions that, if they aren’t true, will leave you delivering no real value to the customer.

Once you identify those assumptions, don’t build an MVP to test them; instead, find the cheapest way possible to test those assumptions.

All you need is a barebones app that does one thing only. Or make just a Python script that outputs to a terminal screen that you can show customers. Or maybe you do several customer interviews and just have conversations. Sometimes you can get by with a piece of paper!

For example, at Flashpoint, our riskiest assumption wasn’t whether we could build a pretty app or even whether we could gather data at scale from the deep and dark web.

Our riskiest assumption was that we could produce unique threat intelligence that customers would find valuable enough to pay for.

To test that assumption, we didn’t need fancy knowledge graphs or AI or under 10ms search.

We just needed to show potential customers a piece of paper with our intelligence on it and ask, do you find this valuable enough to pay for?

Once we had enough customers saying they were willing to pay for our intelligence, we had sufficiently de-risked our most critical assumption.

From there, we started building our platform which had all the bells and whistles—but ultimately our customers were there (and only there!) because we had the most valuable intel.

So fall in love with the RAT: Find your riskiest assumptions and test them as cheaply as possible.

Only after you’ve de-risked your assumptions are you ready to start building your MVP.

What are some of the inexpensive experiments you’ve done to test your riskiest assumptions?