Founder guides

The founder documents, explained block by block.

Deep dives organised the way founders work: Strategy & Discovery, Core Startup Documents, and Fundraising Documents. Origin, when to reach for each, what good answers look like, and the mistakes that quietly kill them.

Strategy & Discovery

Frameworks for customers, problems, and markets.

9

Canvas guide7 min read

Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas is the visual lingua franca of strategy. It forces you to declare — in nine specific blocks — how your company creates, delivers, and captures value. Strong canvases read as a system; every block reinforces the others.

Canvas guide6 min read

Lean Canvas

The Lean Canvas keeps the one-page shape of the BMC but reorganises it around the questions that matter when you are pre-traction. It forces you to confront the problem you are solving before you fall in love with the solution you have built.

Canvas guide6 min read

Value Proposition Canvas

The VPC zooms into the one connection that powers the entire Business Model Canvas: the link between a customer segment and the value proposition served to it. It separates what the customer is trying to do from what you offer, then asks whether the two actually click.

Canvas guide5 min read

SWOT Analysis

SWOT is the simplest strategic-planning framework that survived the test of time. It pairs an internal audit (strengths/weaknesses) with an external one (opportunities/threats) so you stop confusing the two — and stop blaming the market for things that are actually within your control.

Canvas guide6 min read

Empathy Map

Personas summarise users; empathy maps inhabit them. Each quadrant captures a different sensory or cognitive layer of the user's daily life, so the team builds a shared mental model of who they're designing for and why their choices make sense from the inside.

Canvas guide7 min read

Jobs-To-Be-Done

JTBD treats every purchase as a hire. The customer isn't buying a product; they're hiring it to make progress in their life. This canvas surfaces the motivation behind the job, the forces pushing and pulling the customer, and the digitisation opportunities you can serve.

Canvas guide5 min read

Problem Statement Canvas

Most failed products solve a poorly-defined problem. The Problem Statement Canvas slows you down at the start — naming the context, the affected customers, the emotional and quantifiable impact, and the workarounds people use today — so you can commit to building from a sharpened brief, not a vague hunch.

Strategy guide5 min read

TAM, SAM, SOM

A staple of pitch decks and board updates. TAM, SAM, SOM forces you to be honest about how big "big" really is — and to separate the demand that exists in the world from the demand you can actually win with the team, channel, and capital you have today.

Strategy guide5 min read

Competitor analysis

Most competitor analyses are a feature matrix where you happen to win every row. This one forces a sharper read: who are you really competing with — including spreadsheets, manual work, and "we don't do it" — and what is the defensible angle that's yours alone?

Core Startup Documents

Pitches, plans, and positioning.

8

Core document5 min read

Executive Summary

The executive summary is the single most-read founder document. Most are vague mission paragraphs that could describe any company. A strong one is concrete — a stranger should be able to repeat what you do after one read, and an investor should know whether to schedule the meeting before they finish the page.

Core document5 min read

One-pager

A one-pager is the document founders send when "send me something" is the response to a cold intro. It has to work on a phone, in a coffee shop, between meetings. Tight headlines, scannable cells, real numbers — every block earns its space.

Core document8 min read

Business Plan

A business plan is the long-form sibling of the exec summary — the document that funds a grant, opens a bank line, or anchors a board meeting. It reads less like a pitch and more like an operating manual: what we'll do, how we'll do it, what could go wrong, and how we'll know it's working.

Fundraising document6 min read

Financial Projections

A spreadsheet without an assumptions story is a spreadsheet without defenders. This is the document that lives alongside the model — naming the drivers, the growth rates, the cost structure, and the worst case. Every number on the projection page should map to a sentence here.

Core document5 min read

Product Roadmap

A roadmap is not a feature list. It is a sequence of bets about what changes the trajectory of the business — and a pre-commitment to the metrics that tell you if each bet worked. Strong roadmaps focus; weak ones list every idea anyone has had.

Core document6 min read

Go-to-Market

Most GTM plans pretend to be multi-channel because picking feels risky. But picking is the whole point — every channel implies a motion, every motion implies a CAC, every CAC implies a price. A real GTM forces eight chained decisions and survives the consequences of each.

Core document5 min read

Pricing Strategy

Pricing is a forcing function: it picks who buys, sets the expectation they'll bring, and funds (or starves) growth. The deepest decision is the value metric — what scales the price. After that, tier design and discount discipline write themselves.

Core document5 min read

Market Research

Most market-research docs read like analyst-report mashups. A good one is sharper: it separates evidence from inference, names the method behind each claim, and is honest about what you still don't know. The Open Questions section is the most valuable block.

Fundraising Documents

Investor-facing memos and the math behind the ask.

7

Fundraising document7 min read

Investor Memo

A great investor memo opens with a thesis and lets every section either prove or stress-test it. Most founder memos pitch; the best ones argue. The risks section is where weak memos hand-wave and strong ones surface the questions partners would ask anyway.

Fundraising document5 min read

Fundraising Plan

A fundraising plan is a project plan, not a hope. Round size needs a milestone story behind it. The investor list needs warm-intro paths. The timeline needs to be survivable on current runway. And the backup plan needs to exist before you need it.

Fundraising document4 min read

Use of Funds

A great use-of-funds doesn't list categories — it tells a hiring story. Each bucket is people plus tools plus runway, each tied to a milestone, each defensible if a partner asks "why this much, why now?" Investors read it for confidence, not for arithmetic.

Fundraising document4 min read

Revenue Model

A revenue model is a multiplication, not a list. Pick the primary stream, name the unit, ground the LTV in retention you can defend, and compound it with an expansion lever the product makes inevitable. Five blocks; no waffle.

Fundraising document5 min read

Unit Economics

Unit economics is where the story meets arithmetic. Investors look here to see whether scaling will work or just amplify a problem. Strong unit-economics pages state formulas explicitly, separate fully-loaded CAC from paid CAC, and use gross-margin payback honestly.

Fundraising document4 min read

Traction Metrics

Traction is the most-skipped section that investors read first. Strong founders lead with one absolute number with units and a date, back it with cohort retention, and bring it to life with a named logo. Weak pages lead with "300% growth" from a base of three.

Fundraising document5 min read

Valuation Assumptions

Valuation conversations go better when the founder shows the math. Strong founders triangulate three methods, name the assumptions explicitly, and defend a range with a walk-away. Weak founders pull a number from a hot recent deal and dare the partner to challenge it.

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