Excuse me, is there a problem? Score your idea's path to a viable business
Find out whether your idea can become a real business — a seven-factor Fermi scorecard that multiplies out to a viability verdict before you build. Adapted from Excuse me, is there a problem?.
- Input
- A business idea — anywhere from a rough direction to a running product — plus whatever real data you have.
- Output
- A PROBLEM-SCORE.md scorecard — seven evidence-cited Fermi scores, a viability verdict, and re-scored niche scenarios.
What this is about
Solving a real problem is — perhaps surprisingly — not nearly enough to build a successful company. Founders routinely confirm the problem exists, build a product that genuinely solves it, and still fail, because there are five more gates between "real problem" and "viable business model" — and because founders score themselves too generously at every one of them.
This skill walks you through the path from "The Problem" to "Viable Business Model," scoring your specific target market on seven multiplying criteria using power-of-ten Fermi estimates. The best case is that all seven hold; realistically some are strong and some are weak, and the multiplied score is the simple directional tool that shows whether your big strengths overcome your few weaknesses. It refuses to score a generic idea, challenges every optimistic number unless evidence backs it, can do lightweight research to check your market-size claims, and when the score comes out negative, helps you re-target a niche and re-score — or face the truth that the idea isn't viable, while you still have the time and money to find a better one.
The seven criteria
Each criterion has its own article-length story behind it; the score is just the compressed version.
- Plausible — do 10M consumers or 100k businesses actually have the problem? The threshold comes from conversion math, and from how price and quantity trade off in your business model.
- Self-Aware — do they know and care that they have the problem? Customer development is how you find out, and a mission is what it takes to survive educating a market that doesn't.
- Lucrative — is there substantial allocated budget? Positioning as creating value rather than saving money is often the difference.
- Liquid — are they willing and able to buy right now? The failure mode is Product Purgatory: they love it, agree it's valuable, and still don't buy, because you're priority seven.
- Eager (identity) — do they trust you and want to buy from you? The mechanics are the Love and Utility kinds of willingness-to-pay.
- Eager (comparative) — are you differentiated in a way enough of the market cares about? See leverage and Worse, but unique.
- Enduring — will they still be paying (or paying it forward) a year from now? Churn is exponential while growth is at best quadratic, so retention math always catches up.
Example invocation
You can invoke the skill like this:
/asb-problem I'm building an uptime-monitoring tool for developers
of Shopify apps. It catches silent failures and alerts them before their
merchants notice. I'd charge $19/mo. I have 40 free beta users but only 3
paying customers so far. Score it — keep the files in ./viability
You're first held to a specific target market — a specific buyer with a specific problem at a specific price — and then walked through the seven criteria one at a time, with every optimistic score challenged unless evidence backs it. You walk away with a scorecard file, a directional verdict, and if the number comes out bad, re-scored niche scenarios that might rescue the idea — or a clear-eyed reason to move on.
Say where you're working — name a directory or point at existing files in the invocation — so the skill keeps its files together there; if you don't, it asks before creating anything.
From the source
The primary article behind this skill is Excuse me, is there a problem?, where Jason lays out the full path from "The Problem" to "Viable Business Model" — the seven scoring criteria, the Fermi-estimation rubric, the multiply-and-normalize scoring, and what to do with a negative answer.
Supporting articles each ground one criterion or the scoring method itself:
- Fermi ROI: Fixing the ROI rubric — why every score is a power of ten, why you multiply when all factors are required, and why debate should be spent only where people disagree by an order of magnitude.
- Product Purgatory: When they love it but still don't buy — the deep story behind the Liquid criterion: the Magic Wand Test, the top-three-priorities rule, and narrowing your target with "…and needs it right now."
- Willingness-to-pay: Creating permanent competitive advantage for the right reasons — Love, Utility, and Coercion: the mechanisms behind the Eager scores and the lock-in end of Enduring.
- The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies — what real competitive differentiation is, grounding the Eager (comparative) score.
- Worse, but unique — why differentiation means picking your own game, not winning the feature-comparison matrix.
- Pricing determines your business model — what each order of magnitude of price implies for the business, grounding the Lucrative score and the customers-needed math behind Plausible.
- Selling to Carol — why re-targeting a niche after a negative score isn't shrinking your ambition: bullseye targeting sells far beyond the bullseye.
- Failure to face the truth — the posture behind the whole exercise: optimism inflation is the default, and the score only helps if you refuse to flinch at the answer.
- Chapters 2 and 3 of Hidden Multipliers: Carol Loves You for You and Speaking Carol Into Existence — hiddenmultipliers.com — why narrowing the target market to improve the score is usually the right move: focus wins, and the bullseye sells far beyond the bullseye.
- Chapter 4 of Hidden Multipliers: A Rose by Any Other Name (section "The Golden Rule of Copywriting: Be Specific") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the specificity standard the skill holds every target-market description to before it agrees to score anything.