Before you write a single line of code, seven questions decide whether your SaaS idea deserves to exist: what problem you solve, for whom, how much those people will pay, what the V1 scope is, how you are different, which channel brings your first customers, and how you will measure success. Answering them honestly takes a day. Skipping it costs months of development and tens of thousands of euros on a product nobody was waiting for.
The 7 questions, in one checklist
- The problem: what concrete, frequent and painful problem do you solve?
- The target: who exactly lives it, badly enough to seek a solution today?
- Willingness to pay: are these people already paying to solve it, and how much?
- V1 scope: which 3 to 5 flows are enough to prove the value?
- Differentiation: why you rather than the existing tools or a spreadsheet?
- Acquisition channel: where do your first 10 customers come from?
- Measuring success: what single number says it works within 90 days?
The trio that decides whether there is a market
The first three questions validate demand. A problem worth a SaaS is frequent (it comes back every week, not once a year) and painful (it costs time, money or stress). The target must be precise enough that you can name ten concrete people to call tomorrow. And the most reliable signal is willingness to pay: if your future customers already patch together a solution with spreadsheets, paid tools or a contractor, the pain is real. If they have never spent a cent on it, be wary.
What you are actually building
Questions 4 and 5 define the product. The V1 scope must fit into 3 to 5 essential flows: everything else is noise that delays launch. Differentiation is not about a feature list but about a clear angle — an underserved segment, an integration nobody offers, a speed the big players cannot match. If your only answer is “but better”, you do not have differentiation yet.
Coding is the easy part. The expensive part is spending six months building something nobody wants to buy.
How you bring it to market
The last two questions decide survival. A good product with no acquisition channel never finds its customers: know, before you code, where your first ten come from (network, communities, SEO, direct outreach, partnerships). And set a single 90-day success metric — paying customers, recurring revenue, retention rate — to decide objectively between persevering and pivoting, instead of telling yourself stories.
Once those seven answers are written down in black and white, development becomes simple and fast. That is exactly the scoping we run at Khufu before shipping a production V1 in 7 days, at a fixed price of 15,000 EUR: a tight scope, validated up front, to build only what proves the value — and nothing else.