Key Takeaways:
- Founders use the PRFAQ Framework to think critically about their startup, articulate the story clearly, and inspire their team and investors to act.
- Founders write their PRFAQ to create a better pitch deck and as the strategic basis for their product roadmap, go-to-market, and OKRs.
- The PRFAQ is the best tool to develop a better vision and strategy, leading to fewer mistakes, pivots, and team misalignment.
The PRFAQ is the ideal framework for startup founders and executives. It helps them develop a powerful vision that resonates with their team, investors, and candidates. It works for early stage founders (pre-founding, pre-seed, or seed) and for later-stages (Series A, B, and C). Early-stage founders need to discover the best hypothesis to address a customer need before they invest a lot of money or time. Later-stages founders want to ensure focus on the near- and long-term vision to scale and optimize their business.
For pre-founders, there is a gap between the spark of an idea and the commitment to execute it. How and when do they build the confidence to pursue this venture? It’s common for pre-founders to make up a story in their mind of why the world has the problem it has or needs the solution they envision. Pre-founders to struggle to put a coherent story together and explain what opportunity they are going after and why. Resorting to a pitch deck creates the illusion of coherence and depth that investors and customers see right through it.
Early-stage founders fall to the pitch deck trap as a starting point. They might not have a proof-of-concept, prototype, or minimum (viable) product yet. As they tell their story to investors, candidates, and customers, they trip in their own words, forget important aspects to explain, and get caught by surprise by questions they should have the answers to. Their team gets frustrated by the lack of clarity in the vision and they each work to their own beat because of the lack of clear (product) strategy, miss-prioritizing work.
Finally, later-stage founders have to fight to keep their team aligned on vision, mission, and strategy. New employees join the company and take a long time to internalize the North Star vision. Small (or big) shifts in strategy, new line of businesses, or pivots don’t trickle down as expected, and even lead investors or board members learn “too late” about these shifts.
The PRFAQ Framework helps pre-, early-stage, and later-stage founders along the way.
Pre-founders use the PRFAQ Framework to develop their idea from their own intuition to a data-informed and wisdom of the (expert) crowd one. The PRFAQ method encourages them to discover aspects of the problem, the customer, and the solution they have not considered yet. They will abandon a “bad” idea before sinking tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and months (or even years) of their life. They end up with conviction in the opportunity, finding an adjacent (and bigger or more urgent) problem to pursue, or dropping it all. Using the PRFAQ helps them surface crucial information and stack the odds in their favor.
Founders that already committed to their startup (a.k.a., they’ve made the jump) use a PRFAQ to solidify their story and anchor the team on a shared vision, mission, and strategy. The framework allows them to articulate clearly what they know and what they need to prove to move the venture to the next level. They will describe the existing customer discovery efforts and market research and call out the open assumptions and hypotheses. At this stage, it’s not just about the problem and the solution, but also identifying customer awareness (marketing) and acquisition (sales/business development) hypotheses. PRFAQs are the source of truth to create a pitch deck. Instead of shallow slides and eight-words bullet points, they put deep thinking into it and they synthesize it in a presentation if needed.
For later-stage founders, post-product-market fit, they use PRFAQs to be the source of truth for the vision, mission, and strategy. It guides the inspiration for the team, and serves as the sanity check during goal setting (OKRs) and execution. The PRFAQ is the basis for product and go-to-market plans. Changes in strategy, pivots, or new lines of businesses get captured in a new PRFAQ. A best practice is for later-stage founders to write a new PRFAQ before their annual planning cycle and before their teams define their plans and OKRs. Founders work with the board and their leadership team to develop the PRFAQs.
In all cases, for the pre-founder, early- or later-stage founder, PRFAQs help them uncover and think through the key aspects of their story, what they are doing, why, and the next steps. It’s a minor effort in the big picture of building a successful company that will save countless hours of randomness, distractions, and misalignment among the people involved.
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Who’s this for?
Founders and C-level executives of early- and later-stage startups, and those considering founding a startup.
What makes a PRFAQ great for founders?
Founders must be resourceful since they live in a budget-constrained environment. One of the expensive mistakes founders make is the lack of focus or unnecessary changes in direction. A PRFAQ is a cheap investment for a founder to minimize costly future distractions.
Who are the collaborators for the PRFAQ?
Pre-founders and early-stage founders in small startups enlist advisors, mentors, ex-coworkers, domain experts, and their team (even if small) in helping review and develop the PRFAQ. Bigger startups enlist their executive team, board members, investors, advisors, and even key customers to help them.
Who do they share the PRFAQ?
Founders share the PRFAQ, redacted of financial information if needed, with their entire organization. They share it with your board of directors, lead investors, and advisors. If they are seeking funding, they share it with prospective angel investors, VCs, and accelerators. Like a pitch deck, there is a risk investors will forward the PRFAQ to competitors. Founders should create a version that doesn’t reveal sensitive intellectual property until they build trust and a “soft” commitment from the investor. Treat a PRFAQ as an internal confidential document, like a financial model, a business plan, or the product roadmap.
When is it not appropriate to use a PRFAQ?
Founders don't use a PRFAQ as a substitute for OKRs, roadmap plans, product requirement documents (PRDs), go-to-market plans, or adoption and financial models. A PRFAQ stays in the realm of vision, mission, and strategy, and it’s not to be used for tactical and execution plans. PRFAQs are also not retrospective documents to be used as quarterly business reviews (QBRs).
