Unlike some venture studios that launch dozens of companies annually, Stackpoint is a full-stack studio that takes a highly selective approach. We launch 3-5 ventures each year, focusing our resources on opportunities with the highest probability of success. Every venture we pursue goes through a rigorous evaluation process across five key dimensions to ensure it has real market potential, strong differentiation, and a clear execution path.
📚 Background Context
Before committing resources to any idea, we establish a comprehensive foundation of research and validation. This includes deep analysis of market trends, existing solutions, customer behaviors, and competitive dynamics. We often begin with exploratory work - leveraging our industry expertise, conducting focused customer conversations, and analyzing market data to determine if there's a compelling opportunity worth pursuing. Through our discovery process, we continuously refine the venture's positioning to ensure strong alignment between market needs and our internal capabilities.
🎯 Problem Discovery
Checklist:
✅ There is a clear problem or unmet need
✅ Customers are highly motivated to solve this problem
The foundation of every successful business is a real, urgent problem that customers are actively trying to solve. We look for pain points where customers are already spending significant money or effort on suboptimal solutions. Through extensive customer interviews and market research, we validate both the severity of the problem and customers' willingness to pay for better solutions.
🤩 Solution Discovery
Checklist:
✅ Value: We’ve identified a high-value solution that customers will love
✅ Differentiation: Our solution will be clearly different and better than existing solutions / ways our customers currently solve this problem
✅ Feasibility:
We can build a “minimum lovable solution” with our current resources and desired launch -> independence timeline, including delivering real user value before or w/in a few months of launch
Our “minimum lovable solution” can eventually be scaled (e.g., no hard technical, legal, regulatory, cost or market barriers)
✅ Viability:
We can imagine a credible path to attractive unit + company-level economics, including cost effective customer acquisition (relative to customer lifetime value)
We do not see any show-stopping dependency risks (e.g., single design partner, data provider, legal/regulatory overhang)
Having a solution isn't enough - it must be dramatically better than existing alternatives. We evaluate potential solutions across four critical dimensions:
Value Creation: The solution must deliver clear, measurable benefits that drive enthusiastic customer adoption. We look for order-of-magnitude improvements in cost, efficiency, or user experience compared to current solutions.
Differentiation: Beyond just being better, the solution needs clear sustainable advantages versus alternatives. This could be through technology, business model innovation, or unique market access.
Feasibility: We prioritize solutions that can be built and launched relatively quickly, delivering our "minimum lovable solution" within months. We avoid opportunities requiring years of development or heavy regulatory approval before market testing.
Viability: The solution must be able to scale without hitting hard barriers around technology, regulations, data access, or customer acquisition costs. We assess these potential roadblocks early in our evaluation process.
📊 Market Opportunity Research
Checklist:
✅ Why now: There is a clear “why now” for this business (e.g., new problem, or old problem that could not be solved at scale until now)
✅ White space: There is enough “white space” for a new offering (i.e., not already a completely crowded space)
✅ TAM: Total addressable market (TAM) is large enough to support a venture-scale business
✅ Attractive theme: We’re building into a theme that VCs are interested in investing behind
Market timing is crucial. We identify specific catalysts that make a solution uniquely viable today, such as technological breakthroughs, regulatory shifts, or evolving customer expectations. Without a clear timing advantage, even the best ideas can struggle to gain traction. Data shows that poor market timing accounts for 42% of startup failures, making this a critical evaluation factor.
We also ensure there's sufficient white space for new entrants. While competition validates market demand, oversaturated markets with well-funded incumbents often make differentiation and customer acquisition challenging.
We also consider alignment with current investment themes, as swimming against the tide of investor interest can make future fundraising unnecessarily difficult.
⚡ Edge
Checklist:
✅ Unfair advantage: We bring a true “unfair advantage” to the table (e.g., unique market access, customer insight, IP or other know-how)
✅ Founder: We have an excellent founder
✅ Excitement: We’re excited to build this company right now
Finally, we evaluate our unique advantages that competitors can't easily replicate. This includes our deep industry relationships, access to key customers, proprietary technology, or operational expertise that gives us execution advantages. By maintaining these high standards and only launching ventures that meet all our criteria, we can systematically build category-defining businesses.
