At Stackpoint, we're highly selective, launching only 3-4 companies annually. This rigorous approach ensures we commit resources solely to ventures where we have strong conviction for success. Our disciplined concept validation process systematically analyzes opportunities from multiple angles, guaranteeing we pursue the right problems with the right strategy.
Here's how we transform raw ideas into high-conviction investment opportunities.
Where Our Ideas Come From
Our venture concepts originate from three primary sources, each providing unique insights into market needs:
Internal Research and Discovery
We proactively explore emerging technologies, market dynamics, and user pain points to identify high-potential problems and solutions. This involves deep research, hypothesis testing, and conviction-building before pursuing an opportunity.
Industry and Investment Network
We leverage Stackpoint's extensive network of investors and industry insiders - portfolio managers, property operators, VCs, commercial lenders, and institutional funds. These aligned relationships give us a distinct advantage in surfacing overlooked but mission-critical problem areas and rapidly validating ideas through warm discovery conversations.
Founder-Initiated Concepts
Experienced founders often approach us with early-stage ideas born from firsthand pain points. We typically engage only at the inception stage, before significant development has begun. Stackpoint specializes in guiding ventures from the earliest stages, ensuring they're structured for success from day one.
Our Multi-Angle Evaluation Framework
Once we identify a promising concept, we evaluate it through several critical lenses. This systematic approach ensures we only move forward with ideas that have a clear path to product-market fit.
Market Analysis: Understanding the Landscape
We begin by mapping the market comprehensively, examining it from multiple dimensions to build a complete picture of the opportunity and challenges ahead.
Market Structure and Fundamentals
Our analysis starts with understanding the industry's core components, historical context, and key interdependencies.
We assess whether the market is highly consolidated with dominant players or fragmented with smaller firms, as this directly impacts go-to-market strategy and competitive positioning. We examine existing business models and cost structures to understand how different approaches might fit and what resources would be required to succeed.
Economic Landscape and Market Sizing
We leverage both public and proprietary data sources to assess market size, transaction volumes, and revenue flows within the industry. This includes analyzing key economic indicators that impact specific market segments and understanding the broader financial health of potential customer bases. We pay particular attention to spending patterns and budget allocation trends that could affect adoption of new solutions.
Technology Innovation Gaps
Many mature industries still rely on outdated systems or manual processes, creating opportunities for automation and AI-driven efficiencies. We identify where legacy technology creates friction, increases costs, or limits scalability. These gaps often represent the most compelling entry points for new ventures, especially when combined with emerging capabilities like vertical AI solutions.
Timing and Market Windows
Market timing can determine whether a venture achieves rapid adoption or struggles for years. We assess external drivers including macroeconomic trends, technological shifts, regulatory changes, and behavioral shifts that create windows of opportunity.
For example, new compliance requirements might create urgent demand for automation tools, or economic pressures might drive adoption of cost-saving technologies.
Strategic Fit Assessment
We evaluate whether the market provides unique advantages for Stackpoint's capabilities, relationships, and expertise. This includes assessing our ability to access key stakeholders, understanding nuanced workflows, and leveraging proprietary insights to create competitive advantages. Markets that require deep industry expertise or strong relationships often provide natural defensibility for our ventures.
Total Addressable Market (TAM) Analysis
Accurately sizing market opportunity requires both analytical rigor and practical judgment. Our TAM analysis combines hard data with validated assumptions to create realistic projections that inform both venture strategy and investor expectations.
Industry Volume and Market Baseline
We start with comprehensive industry research to understand total spend, transaction volumes, and revenue generated across relevant market segments. This baseline comes from credible industry reports, government data, and proprietary research. We're particularly focused on understanding not just market size, but market growth trajectories and the factors driving expansion or contraction.
Segmentation and Addressability
Raw market size numbers can be misleading without proper segmentation. We break down the broader market into specific segments based on company size, user types, geographic regions, and use cases. This segmentation helps us identify which portions of the market are most accessible to a new venture and which might require significant scale or partnerships to address.
Revenue Model Development
Understanding how to monetize within a market is crucial for realistic TAM calculations. We analyze pricing benchmarks, industry-standard fees, and various monetization models to determine sustainable revenue approaches. This includes evaluating whether markets support subscription models, transaction-based pricing, or other structures that align with venture-scale growth expectations.
Serviceable vs. Attainable Markets
We distinguish between what's theoretically addressable and what's realistically achievable. Our serviceable addressable market (SAM) considers factors like geographic limitations, customer acquisition capabilities, and competitive positioning. The serviceable obtainable market (SOM) represents what a new venture could realistically capture in the near, medium, and long term.
Financial Projections and Unit Economics
Beyond top-line revenue potential, we analyze cost structures including operational costs, customer acquisition costs, and gross margins. This analysis helps us assess unit economics early and understand the path to profitability. We also model different scenarios for growth rates and market penetration to stress-test our assumptions.
Exit Strategy Considerations
Different industries command varying valuation multiples and have different paths to exit. We evaluate potential exit strategies from the outset, examining comparable acquisitions and public company valuations to ensure our ventures align with realistic long-term value creation expectations. This "begin with the end in mind" approach helps shape both business model decisions and growth strategies.
Competitive Landscape Assessment
A thorough competitive analysis goes beyond identifying obvious competitors to understanding the entire ecosystem of solutions, substitutes, and alternatives that customers currently use to address their needs.
Mapping the Competitive Ecosystem
We identify and categorize all types of competitors including established incumbents, emerging technology disruptors, legacy solutions, and indirect substitutes. This includes understanding who the market leaders are, what their market share looks like, and how customers currently solve the problems we're targeting.
We pay particular attention to whether major players operate on outdated systems, which often creates opportunities for more modern approaches.
Solution Positioning and Value Propositions
For each significant competitor, we analyze how they articulate the problem and position their solution. This includes studying their messaging, branding, and go-to-market strategies.
Understanding how competitors frame the problem often reveals gaps in positioning or opportunities to address the market from a different angle. We also examine their target users and ecosystem to understand who they serve well and where gaps might exist.
Business Model and Pricing Analysis
We conduct detailed analysis of competitors' revenue structures, pricing strategies, and monetization approaches. This includes understanding whether they use subscription models, transaction-based pricing, or hybrid approaches. We also evaluate their cost structures and assess their ability to compete on price or whether they rely on other forms of differentiation.
Technology and Product Sophistication
We assess the architecture, scalability, and feature comprehensiveness of competitive solutions. This includes evaluating whether solutions are point tools or end-to-end platforms, their level of technology sophistication, and their ability to scale. We often conduct product teardowns and API analysis to understand exactly how existing solutions work and where they might have limitations.
Strategic Positioning and Partnerships
Understanding competitors' strategic advantages helps us identify our own potential advantages and blind spots. We examine their venture backing, industry partnerships, key integrations, and relationships with customers or channel partners. This analysis reveals which competitors have significant resources or strategic moats and which might be more vulnerable to disruption.
Market Feedback and User Sentiment
We gather intelligence on how customers actually experience competitive solutions through industry interviews, community discussions, reviews, and direct user feedback. This on-the-ground perspective often reveals gaps between marketing promises and actual user satisfaction, highlighting opportunities for better solutions.
Defensibility and Moats Analysis
We examine what barriers exist for new entrants and what advantages established players might have through network effects, data advantages, regulatory relationships, or customer switching costs. Understanding these dynamics helps us design strategies to overcome barriers and establish our own defensible positions.
Discovery Partnerships and Validation
Real market validation comes from engaging directly with industry experts and potential customers. Our discovery partnership approach ensures we're building solutions grounded in actual market needs rather than theoretical assumptions.
Structured Industry Expert Engagement
We conduct in-depth sessions with industry veterans, successful entrepreneurs, and domain experts who understand the nuances of specific markets.
These aren't casual conversations but structured interviews designed to understand workflow details, pain points, economic implications, and potential solution approaches. We often arrange onsite visits where experts walk us through their actual workflows, showing us inefficiencies and gaps in real-time.
Multi-Stakeholder Perspective Gathering
Most business problems involve multiple stakeholders with different needs and constraints. We systematically interview end users, buyers, influencers, and decision-makers to understand how solutions need to work across the entire ecosystem. This multi-angle approach often reveals complexities that aren't apparent when talking to just one type of user.
Design Partner Identification
Our discovery process is designed to identify potential design partners early in the concept development phase. These are industry leaders who not only understand the problem deeply but are motivated to collaborate on solving it.
Having committed design partners before launch gives our ventures significant advantages in achieving product-market fit quickly and building credibility with other potential customers.
Problem-Solution Fit Validation
We use discovery conversations to test and refine our understanding of both the problem and potential solution approaches. This iterative process helps us understand what aspects of a problem are most urgent, which solution features would be most valuable, and how solutions need to integrate with existing workflows and systems.
Market Access and Go-to-Market Insights
Through our discovery partnerships, we gain crucial insights into how new solutions actually get adopted in specific industries. This includes understanding sales cycles, evaluation criteria, implementation challenges, and success metrics. These insights directly inform go-to-market strategy and help us design solutions that fit naturally into existing business processes.
Relationship Building for Future Success
The relationships we build during discovery often become instrumental throughout the venture's lifecycle. Industry experts who help shape a solution frequently become advisors, early customers, or strategic partners. This network effect amplifies our ability to achieve rapid market penetration and credibility.
Our Decision Framework: The Stackpoint Scorecard
Every concept is evaluated against our comprehensive scorecard, which includes:
Value and Problem Validation
Clear problem that customers are highly motivated to solve
High-value solution that customers will love
Viability Assessment
Credible path to attractive unit and company-level economics
No show-stopping dependency risks
Cost-effective customer acquisition relative to lifetime value
Feasibility Analysis
Ability to build a "minimum lovable solution" within our timeline
Scalable solution without hard technical, legal, or regulatory barriers
Market Opportunity
Large enough TAM to support a venture-scale business
Sufficient "white space" for a new offering
Attractive investment theme for VCs
Strategic Advantages
Clear differentiation from existing solutions
Strong "why now" thesis
Unfair advantage through unique market access or expertise
From Discovery to Launch Decision
Our comprehensive analysis process culminates in an investment committee review where we examine all findings, assess risks, and determine next steps. We evaluate each opportunity against our detailed decision framework, which covers everything from problem validation and market opportunity to strategic advantages and feasibility constraints. Learn more about our complete evaluation scorecard →
This rigorous analysis leads to a high-conviction go/no-go decision on whether to formally engage design partners, recruit a CEO, and launch the company. By applying this systematic, multi-angle approach, we ensure that every venture we build addresses a real, validated industry pain point with early buy-in from key stakeholders.
To accelerate our discovery process, we leverage AI tools to automate and scale our research capabilities, allowing us to quickly analyze markets, competitive landscapes, and emerging trends with unprecedented speed and comprehensiveness.
This disciplined approach allows us to de-risk opportunities early and build companies with a clear path to success. When we commit to launching a venture, we do so with the highest possible conviction.
The outcome speaks for itself: our portfolio companies achieve a 2-3X graduation rate from pre-seed to seed funding, compared to industry average, while founders retain greater equity ownership through our more efficient funding approach.
