From Intuition to Evidence: How to Structure Founder Intuition Without Killing It (Part 1)
The systematic approach: When you need to structure your vision for team alignment and investor confidence
Founder Intuition: Even good founder intuition needs supporting evidence
For many founders, this Reddit post hits hard. A founder spent £300k on a health app and nobody uses it. The idea was sound, the intuition was strong, but the evidence that this product was needed was missing.
The iconic movie Field of Dreams romanticised the phrase “If you build it, they will come.” It makes for a nice story, but real products have to earn the right to exist by proving they solve a specific customer problem. In fact, analyses suggest roughly half of startups fail within a few years (read here: 2024 analysis from PwC). After 30 years of building tech products, many of us have learned that intuition alone is not enough.
Over the last couple of months I’ve spoken to and interviewed dozens of tech startup founders and aspiring founders. A common thread runs through their stories. Strong intuition and a sharp eye for opportunity. That matters, but even founder intuition needs support when money is on the line.
What you will get with this series: a simple way to keep your intuition, add clean evidence, and validate real customer pain so you can move fast without drifting.
There are thousands of unique stories about how technology companies have succeeded, but some universal truths apply to all of them. Even the best founder intuition misses critical nuances which come in the form of questions they haven’t thought to ask, assumptions they didn’t know they were making, or problems that only emerge in real-world use. That’s why every modern technology company understands that sustainable growth requires a counterintuitive discipline: start small and validate constantly. Find a homogeneous group of users with shared priorities who urgently need one specific problem solved and who will pay for that solution.
Build incrementally, test your assumptions with real customers, secure predictable revenue, and only then expand outward.
🎯Identifying homogenous behaviour amongst a group of users is the single best determinant of product market fit
This disciplined approach to validation isn’t about lacking confidence in your vision. It’s about recognizing that unforeseen gaps between intuition and reality can make or break a startup, and the disciplined practice of gathering unbiased evidence is how you find them before they find you. The reason experienced builders embrace this systematic approach over pure intuition is because many have first hand experience coming to the realisation that:
People might not want or buy what you build, regardless of how certain you feel.
People might not see the value that seems obvious to you.
People might see the value but still not use what you build (at least not regularly).
Your intuitive understanding might not actually address the real problems people have.
It will take more time than you think to discover what truly matters to users.
The true source of value may often not be what your intuition tells you the market needs.
The only way to bridge the gap between intuition and reality is to get your product into users’ hands as fast as possible to speed up the feedback loop and replace assumptions with evidence.
The Trifecta of good product decisions:
This leads us to the core paradigm of good product decisions for startups, which is that good product decisions sit at the intersection of founder intuition, clean evidence, and ruthless focus. At the earliest stages you need all three to build the right thing, the right way, at the right pace. Miss one and you hit a common failure mode:
Without Founder Intuition you miss out on the strategic point of view and the roadmap becomes rudderless.
Without Clean Evidence you risk guessing what the market wants and you may build something that doesn’t exactly address what the market actually needs.
Without Ruthless Focus you risk chasing too many ideas at once, causing progress to slow down and at times, completely grind to a halt as teams switch from idea to idea.
Putting the Trifecta into Practice
Each element of the trifecta requires specific actions to implement which will be covered in this series:
Founder Intuition: Structure it by mapping stakeholders and their problems
Clean Evidence: Gather it through systematic validation of the customer problem using standardised evidence templates
Ruthless Focus: Apply it through clear diagnosis, policy, and coherent actions (Rumelt framework)
5 Minute Quick Start
Write one line that names your target reader and their urgent problem.
For example: “For agency research leads who fight tracker noise every week.”
Draft a testable problem statement:
“When ___ happens, they struggle to ___ because ___. Success looks like ___.”Pick one early signal you could measure in the next sprint.
Time saved, error rate, or a paid pilot are good defaults.
In the next parts we dive into how to harness each element, starting with structuring your founder intuition.
Next: From Intuition to Evidence: Structuring Founder Intuition (part 2)
 | A guest post by
|