Five Factors Baseline Calibration

Owned by Vicki McEwen
Last updated: Dec 04, 2023
5 min read

25 Sharp Questions

These questions are broken into 5 questions for each of the Five Factors developed by Anurag Wadehra.

Sharp Questions are simple but not easy-to-answer questions meant to cut open your fuzzy assumptions in order to expose unclear premises, unspoken hypotheses, and gaps in your knowledge.

Once exposed, you can change your premises, test your hypothesis in the market, and fill the gaps in your knowledge

For the sharp questions below, EXPLAIN your answers and the logic behind it.

1. Hungry Customer Questions

CUSTOMER Questions

Response

  1. Who are your early adopter accounts?

Larger established organizations with compliance-related risks they need to resolve quickly, i.e., risk of failing an audit or not reaching an implementation deadline, etc.

  1. Who’s your ideal buyer champion in an account?

Department head or executives whose compliance initiatives will be simplified, both in time and budget, by leveraging our product.

  1. Who’s your ideal user champion in an account?

Mid to high-level project managers whose jobs will be made simpler and more integral to the compliance process by leveraging our product.

  1. What's the burning business problem you solve for your buyer? 

Lowering compliance-related risks by simplifying compliance initiatives

  1. What's the critical job you help the user get done?

Simplifying risk and gap analysis of compliance initiatives.

How HUNGRY is your customer to solve the problem?

  • Burning PROBLEM:

  • Clear-cut VALUE:

  • Meaningful METRIC:

2. Magical Product Questions

PRODUCT Questions

Response

  1. What is the most critical thing your product does?  Your MVP use case

Simplifies compliance initiatives by using patented technology to linguistically analyze and compare compliance requirements across different compliance documents aka standards, regulations, best practices, etc.

 

  1. What’s your whole product offering*? Key elements other than core product: pricing, integration/deployment, support, etc. 

Saas portal that hosts customizable Compliance Portfolios (compilations of compliance requirements from multiple compliance documents), xls & doc exports, API integration with GRC partner tools, APIs for building custom tools to consume Compliance Portfolios, developer docs, support. Demo accounts, basic subscription, developer subscriptions, and partner subscriptions.

  1. How is your product different from others?

We have patented technology to linguistically analyze and compare compliance requirements across different compliance documents, aka standards, regulations, best practices, etc.

  1. How does your product deliver buyer value?

Provides an aggregation of compliance requirements across different compliance documents that can integrate with additional GRC tools to help different teams manage compliance initiatives.

  1. How does your product deliver user value?

Provides a single source of data to collect information that can be used to perform risk and gap analysis of compliance requirements across different compliance documents.

How MAGICAL is your product in delivering value to the customer?

  • Bold PROMISE:

  • Different OFFERING:

  • Unique INSIGHT:

Product offering includes elements other than core tech/product, such as pricing, integration/deployment services, special terms, and any integration into the network/marketplace.

3. New Game in Category

CATEGORY Questions

Response

  1. What’s your contrarian POV of the [product/tech] category ? Your category is defined according to customers, industry analysts or investors? - e.g. Payroll software, Data analytics for finance, etc.

Compliance initiatives relying on human-only or 

manual Compliance Requirement mapping are too subjective, inconsistent, and difficult to scale and maintain as compliance requirements change and evolve.

  1. What’s the inevitable future of the category from your POV?

The future of compliance requirement mapping is in AI-assisted semantic analysis.

  1. How does your offering change the criteria to purchase & use the category?

Compliance requirement mapping would require repeatable and scalable methods to meet evolving compliance needs

  1. What is your early adopter target segment to enter the market ?  e.g. by size, ENT, MM, SMB; or by geo U.S. EMEA or by vertical, Financial Services, AI for Healthcare etc.

Large enterprises in the IT, Fin Tech, and Health Tech verticals.

  1. How do you convert early adopters to champions of your POV? 

Ingest their internal compliance requirements into the tool and provide quarterly or as-needed updates.

How clear is your NEW GAME in the category?

  • Contrarian POV

  • Changed CRITERIA

  • Early Adopter SEGMENT

4. Repeatable GTM

GTM Questions

Response

  1. What’s your investment limit for a single customer, based on your unit economics, CAC or LTV?

$8k CAC,

  1. What’s your main GTM path? Product Led, Sales/Account Led, Channel Led?

It varies atm it is product-led. Plus, sales and account led, push to change to channel led.

  1. What’s your main GTM playbook &  metric?  E.g. Target Account Sales ARR metric, Paid media based User growth of #DAUs 

Sales, metric is paid accounts growth and turn rates.

  1. Do you need any other GTM paths for PMF? Which ones? In what order? 

Market research, customer engagement

  1. How important is the user community for your PMF? E.g. Developer community, services partner community etc.

Atm, the user community is not integral part of the PMF.

How REPEATABLE is your GTM?

  • ICP Locked:

  • GTM PATH Proven:

  • GTM METRIC Efficient:

5. Ready Talent

TALENT Questions

Response

  1. What’s your founder(s) experience in solving the category problem? 

The founder has decades of experience in the technology space and compliance mapping space; however little in the AI space.

 

  1. What’s your tech leader's experience in building product magic?

Pretty extensive in building product magic.

  1. What’s your GTM leader experience in executing on the main GTM playbook? 

Unknown, who the GTM leader is.

  1. What talent is needed to build or keep your key customer relationships? 

Additional support specialist, additional customer success specialist

  1. What talent is missing for executing on PMF? 

UX developer, additional product designer, data analyst  

How READY is your talent to execute on PMF?

  • KEY TALENT In Position

  • KEY HIRES In Pipeline

  • PMF TEAM In Play

PMT Metric & Cycle Time

 

Step 1

Step 2

INSTRUCTION

 

Go across each row below

IDENTIFY your top success METRICS for a factor that will confirm that you are succeeding in that factor. 

 

See examples below, but choose based on your business. 

ESTIMATE how long would it take for you to test the factor in the market, regardless of whether you succeed or not. 

 

See examples below, but choose based on your business. 

Five Factors

Success Metrics

Cycle Time

Customer

 

Choose your top metric

 

# Customers, ARR (annual recurring revenue), #Users, DAUs (daily active users)

NPS (net promoter score)

Time to close paying customer

 

Time to acquire a user 

Product

Choose your top metric

 

MVP (minimum viable product) capabilities, critical release,

 

Positive WOM (word of mouth) on product

Time to go-live with MVP

 

Time to release iteration of MVP

Category

Choose your top metric

 

Category acceptance, extension or creation by X

Time to validate category 

Go To Market

Choose your top metric

 

GTM metric - customer or user growth, sales yield, cost efficiency (CAC<LTV, Net Burn) 

(Customer acquisition cost, lifetime value)

Time to sales yield > 1

 

Time to organic user growth

 

Time to cost efficiency

Talent

Choose your top metric

 

Hire/ rent missing talent

Time to hire/ rent key talent

Step 3: Select the top metric & cycle time across all factors

PMF Target

Choose The Most Critical Metric from above column; Give reasons

 

PMF Cycle Time

 

Choose the Longest Time from above column; give reason