Two Minutes on Tech | Issue #70
Many founders only realise whether an idea is ready once they start building it. But by that point, the signals are usually already there. You just need the right questions to surface them before committing months of time and resources in the wrong direction.
Here are six of them. Answer honestly. If two or more make you pause, that’s not a bad sign. That’s the gap showing up now, while it’s still cheap to fix.
Can you state the problem you’re solving without describing your product to explain it?
This tests whether the idea exists because of a real problem, or because a solution came first and the problem got built around it afterward.
Could someone else explain your idea back to you correctly after hearing it once?
Founders are usually the worst judge of their own explanation. This tests whether the idea is actually clear, or just clear to you.
If a well-funded competitor launched tomorrow, what would still make someone choose you?
Most founders can answer this with a feature list. Few can answer it with a reason.
What are the two things you’d cut first if you had to ship in half the time?
This tests whether scope was ever deliberately prioritized, or whether everything feels essential because nothing’s been pressure-tested yet.
What would have to be true for your first ten users to tell someone else about this?
This tests whether there’s an actual mechanism for growth, or just a hope that a good product spreads on its own.
If an investor asked what this looks like in three years, would your answer match what you’re actually building today?
This tests whether the current build is heading toward the story you’d tell, or just heading somewhere.
Close the Gap Before You Build
These questions aren’t meant to be graded. They’re meant to show you where the gap is before it gets expensive. That’s what Venture Forge works through: not judging the idea, but structuring the parts that are still shaky, before a single line of code depends on them.
Talk to us: no sales pitch, no pressure →
What’s New in Tech
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded to criticism that his warnings about AI risk are fueling public backlash against the industry, saying the real issue is a broader crisis of trust between the public and powerful institutions, tech included.
- Reddit is testing short-form audio and video versions of its most popular posts, letting users listen or watch instead of read. The initial rollout covers select English-language communities on iOS and Android.
- Germany’s antitrust regulator ordered Apple to redesign its app-tracking consent prompts after finding they made it easier for users to approve Apple’s own data use than third-party apps’. Apple has four months to roll out the changes across the EU.
- Software Engineering Daily’s latest episode looks at how AI-generated code and autonomous agents are reshaping cloud infrastructure, from sandboxed environments for unreviewed code to agents spinning services up and down without a human in the loop. Render CEO Anurag Goel joins the episode to talk about why AI-era infrastructure is increasingly trading fine-grained control for speed and safety.
At Art+Logic, we help founders close the gap between an idea and a system built to hold up under real conditions. That’s what Venture Forge is for.