September 10, 2026

Super useful business tools for founders.

Technical founders often have the right intentions but no clear path to market. This toolbox, break-even analysis, stakeholder mapping, market-chain mapping and more, helps test real signal. Posts ahead on each tool; team and funding topics come later.

I talk to dozens of founders of varied backgrounds, all interesting, every month. This month, one was a practicing medical doctor developing a technology for surveilling bladder cancer. Another was an engineer developing real-time image capture software for mapping three dimensional spaces with millimeter-level precision. I also had the fortune of helping two university professors working on solutions to bottlenecks in training doctors during their fellowships. I can go on and on.

What these founders have in common is a deep desire to do good, to help people, to solve real problems affecting people by developing novel products based on science and technology they have developed over years of work and study.

This is all good, right? Yes. Their intentions are clear, positive and their drive unquestionable. However, as they make progress towards building a business, they often feel something is off. They come face-to-face with the reality that the path for making a product or a service that people will actually use does not exist. They suddenly find themselves in unchartered waters.

I’ve seen so many people struggle through this that I created a toolbox with simple and proven tools to trail blaze a path. The tools, listed below, are not mysterious nor esoteric, and some are of my own creation. They work in many business settings. Think of them as a pliers, screwdrivers, hammers, measuring tapes, nails, etc. of business formation and growth. These tools are essential for formulating hypotheses and testing through experiments like interviewing people, simple preference tests, etc.

Here they are, in alphabetical order:

• Break-even analysis,
• Business process mapping and analysis,
• Example trades,
• First-principle approximations,
• Market-chain mapping,
• Issues analysis, and
• Stakeholder mapping.

I will write short posts explaining how I use each of these tools. Note these tools are especially good at helping scientific or technical founders carve out paths for successful commercialization of their technology.

Certainly, founders have many more priorities, such as building a team, securing capital, negotiating contracts, etc. There are tools for these too, but that’s for another day.