I'm interested in making this into a framework and it's been difficult to say the least.<p>The high level things about a startup are very consistent and good candidates to be fit into a framework. I'm not sure but I think these are just called unit economics. Things like "Our product is sold for $X because it saves our customer Y in time". However it's the unknown, and emotional values that I've found incredibly hard to fit into a framework. I'm fascinated now in seeing if the way the finance industry calculates risk is in any way a good framework for startups to assess which features to build.<p>What I've found to be the hardest questions to answer...<p>How do I find industry metrics on an industry that doesn't exist yet?<p>How do I prove people will want something that they don't want right now?<p>How do I measure emotional value? Tactile sensation(hardware)? UX, UI, etc...<p>These are the things that startups often believe to be their advantage over the competition. "Our product is much more fun/easy/fast to use/learn/teach" But how do we measure that?<p>The most valuable exercise I've come up with is this question...<p>How would your user recreate your product, if you're product didn't exist and they had to piece together the end result with existing technology?<p>I have a startup right now that creates custom educational podcasts by summarizing publicly available content (with attribution) to generate entirely new content and sort the corpus in increasing complexity. If you searched "Skateboarding", you would get a text document that taught you what skateboarding is, then the history of skateboarding, and then get into beginner, intermediate, and advanced skateboarding lessons. This would go through text-to-voice and be downloaded to your device for offline listening.<p>Search any topic and you get a 45 minute podcast to listen to on your commute.<p>In our case, I stepped back and said "Okay... If I wanted an educational podcast on skateboarding, the first thing I would do is search Google, then Wikipedia, then I would start going to skateboarding blogs and read them one by one in increasing complexity. If I wanted to consume this content during my commute I would take all of this content and copy it into a text-to-voice service, and download that audio file on my phone for listening offline." I walked through this entire process and it took me 1 hour to get 45 minutes worth of audio content.<p>Peter Thiel says that your solution must be 10X better than the existing solution.[0]<p>Unfortunately for me, I think I will need to cut the time it takes to manually create a podcast by 1/10 and also 10x the quality of the content, which I don't know that I can do.<p>Tangentially, I often joke that if the problem your startup is trying to solve doesn't exist as a meme, than it's not a real problem for enough people.<p>[0] <a href="http://blog.hypeinnovation.com/peter-thiels-7-questions-for-product-innovation" rel="nofollow">http://blog.hypeinnovation.com/peter-thiels-7-questions-for-...</a>