Good question…

At a high level, I’d say success is running through a proper customer validation process itself. It’s the thing most founders struggle with the most in the early stages. This kind of process is about getting comfortable talking to customers and incorporating their feedback into what you build before you build it.

As far as tangible deliverables, I figure a 3-4 person team should probably be able to at least produce the following:

• mvp development
  • landing page
  • wire frame or design prototype
• customer validation
  • run an ad experiment
  • interview 5-10 potential customers
  • survey 40 or more potential

If we’re firing on all cylinders, we might even be able to push a v1, and depending on where the idea lands, success might be a 100 person waiting list or 1 paying customer. TBD.

As far as format. I’d propose the following, timezones permitting:

• Friday afternoon/evening
  • meet & greet
  • review ideas (I can send out a template to help people flesh out their ideas) & vote one to pursue
  • for the winning idea, team should further analyze assumptions and come up with plan for talking to potential customers the next day/morning.
• Saturday Morning
  • The next morning should be spent on the phones and message boards talking to target customers. If we do our jobs well and listen to the feedback, our idea will likely change quite a bit.
  • Once we have clarity about the problems customers actually have that we can solve, we should reconvene on the problem statement and our solution.
• Saturday Afternoon/Evening
  • Assuming the solution is still financially viable, we start designing the wire frames and landing page.
• Sunday
  • We put some money behind social media ads or whatever makes sense
  • If the product winds up being some sort of simple marketplace, we might be able to spin up a simple v1 off of a nocode template or something.
  • We pitch our idea to either an angel investor or domain expert for feedback (not a check - we’re not there yet).

I think these kinds of projects work best with 3-5 person teams, depending on people’s backgrounds. My ideal is usually 1-2 devs, 1 designer, 1-2 GTM, but I’m also down to have multiple teams self organize in friendly competition so we can push each other. I can maybe bring in an investor friend to judge and give feedback.

Whatever the outcome of the event, I’d suggest letting the idea rest for a week. If it’s still keeping you up at night, keep working on it. Otherwise let it go and we can always do the event again with a different idea.