What has to be true for this business to work?

What Has to Be True for This Business to Work?

A venture plan becomes useful when it stops describing the future as a single story. Most opportunities depend on a small set of load-bearing assumptions: a customer problem is urgent, acquisition is repeatable, the solution can be delivered at target cost, retention is sufficient and capital arrives before cash runs out. If one fails, improving the rest may not rescue the economics.

Build an assumption architecture from the financial outcome backwards. Decompose revenue into reachable customers, conversion, price, usage and retention; decompose contribution into service effort, variable cost, working capital and scale investment. Mark assumptions with high uncertainty and sensitivity. Those belong at the front of the learning agenda, not in an appendix to the forecast.

Evidence must match the risk. Interviews can establish language and context, but not willingness to pay; a paid pilot can test commitment, but not repeatability; early growth can reveal demand, but not long-run retention. The OECD�s 2025 work on scale-ups finds that 54%�73% maintain their new scale or keep growing three years later, underlining that reaching scale and sustaining it are different tests.

For each critical assumption, define a falsifiable claim, cheapest credible experiment, threshold and decision. Sequence tests by information value per unit of time and cash. Examine dependencies: acquisition economics measured before channel saturation or unit cost measured before service exceptions may improve only because the business has not yet encountered the conditions of scale.

The venture case should end with an assumption ledger, not a confident valuation alone. Show what is known, what is inferred, evidence age, remaining exposure and the action triggered by failure. Funding then buys the next reduction in existential uncertainty. The objective is not to prove the idea right, but to discover whether a viable business can exist.