A studio that says yes to everything is a consultancy with better branding. The first two weeks of any conversation exist to find out whether a venture can stand — and to say so early enough that a no is still useful.

Most of the ventures that reach us arrive as a solution. Someone has seen a gap, imagined the product that fills it, and wants a team that can build it. That is a reasonable place to start a conversation and a poor place to start a company. Before anything is designed or written, we work backwards from the solution to the thing it assumes: that somebody, somewhere, has a problem expensive enough to pay to remove.

The four questions

Every early conversation converges on the same four questions. They are not clever. They are simply the ones that decide whether the rest of the work is worth doing.

Is there a problem someone will pay to solve? Evidence of demand beats an elegant idea, every time. We are looking for the moment a real person, in a real market, chose to spend money or time to make the problem go away — even badly, even with a workaround. If the only evidence is that the problem should annoy people, we have a hypothesis, not a venture.

Is there a founder or operator who will carry it? We build with people, not around them. Someone has to be accountable when the second month is harder than the first, and that person needs a reason to still be there in month nine. A venture with no owner is a project, and projects end when the budget does.

Is there a route to market we can actually reach? Distribution in African markets is designed in during Discover, not discovered after launch. Agents, retailers, partners, institutions and channels that already carry trust are part of the venture design, not a growth problem to be handed to a marketing hire later.

Can the economics stand on their own? A venture must be able to fund its own future. That does not mean profitable in month one; it means the shape of the model, at realistic prices and realistic costs, arrives somewhere a business can live.

We would rather say no in week one than carry a venture that cannot stand.

The four reasons we usually say no

Being specific about a no is more useful than being polite about it. Almost every decline we make falls into one of four categories.

  • No identified customer. There is a market described in the abstract, but nobody we can name, call and ask.
  • A licence nobody can obtain. The model requires permission that is not realistically available to a new entrant on any timeline the venture can survive.
  • Nobody will own the outcome. Everyone in the room is enthusiastic and nobody is accountable.
  • The work only exists to spend a budget. An innovation line item is not a venture thesis.

There is a fifth, and it applies to us as much as to anyone we work with: anything requiring claims we cannot evidence. If a venture only works when the story is stronger than the facts, we are the wrong studio for it.

What a yes actually commits us to

A yes is not an endorsement, it is a decision to spend our own people's time. It means the venture enters Discover with a written thesis, a decision memo and an explicit stage gate at the end. It can stop at that gate. Most of the value of running the model honestly comes from being willing to stop.

If you are carrying something that might survive those four questions, the useful next step is a conversation about the evidence you already have — however small, and however inconvenient.