Thanks, yeah agreed on the discipline itself. You'll usually find a few errors in your plan if you take the time to think it all through.

I just published a Substack on how to score your product ideas like a VC.

This one definitely comes from the heart having spent years building things that not enough people wanted. So I put together a simple model on Google Sheets which helps you rank concepts between 0 and 100 based on numerous inputs.

My hope is that founders can use it at the ideation stage to make better decisions about what opportunities to go after.

I'd welcome any feedback.

Hi HN! I've spent over a decade creating startups, some that went nowhere and some that succeeded (2 exits - Soundwave was acquired by Spotify, Retro Patents was sold on Shopify Exchange). I'm now helping other teams avoid building the wrong thing using a reliable and repeatable product discovery process. There's obviously no magic bullet to product/market fit but the frameworks I've developed can help increase the likelihood of shipping something that sticks. I'd be happy to answer any questions and would welcome feedback!

Great to hear. Thanks for the support.

That was also a surprise to us too!

Awesome suggestion! Sounds like a fun summer project.

Two things -

1) I highly recommend Intentio, http://www.intentioipi.com, if you decide to pursue creation of patent drawings for fictional devices.

2) Be careful you don't tread on copyrights and/or trademarks.

AFAIK we're the first to focus on the startup world. As flagged in the intro, we took our inspiration from a print of a motorcycle but wanted to flesh out the idea in the tech and gaming world which we love.

We've also filed patents ourselves so know the space pretty well.

Thanks for the feedback.

We actually split test this at the very start and the name variant won out. Seems like the majority of customers have a loyalty to the brand/product and preferred having the name.

I guess art is subjective and I can understand why you'd prefer it the other way. Cheers for the comments anyway!

So, maybe offer both styles?

Sounds like a reasonable thing to do - and it's just an additional checkbox on the website, so it's easy too!

Also potentially stocking twice as many items and increasing design work load.

There's a contact us section on the site where we collect all patent requests - please feel free to submit some!

Thanking you kindly!