I created this in early 2016 before Reforge was even incorporated! Andrew Chen and I had ran the MVP course originally called SVBR Growth Series. SVBR = Silicon Valley Business Review. 

 - Early in a company it’s typical for the ideas to come fast and furious 🏎️. It’s easy to get distracted and lose focus. I often returned to this doc to reorient myself on “what am I trying to prove right now?” 

 - It’s specifically named hypothesis canvas because at this stage all of these were just that…hypotheses. We needed to go out and prove whether they were true or not. 

 - Similar to one, early on your head is filled with crazy opportunities. This helped structure all the chaos that was going on in my head and force me to answer questions that I might not have thought about yet. 

Additionally, I gave this to each of our early employees. It helped them get a quick summary of the underlying hypotheses of the business.

I like the a simple framework like Now, Future, Not A Focus. It help clearly distinguishes what is the focus now, what might be next, and what isn’t a focus. 

I think a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to take things off the table early in the business and that leads to a lack of focus. I get it. It’s hard to say that you will “never” do something. 

This format allows you to take some things off the table in a low pressure way. Over a long period of time we ended up pulling some of the items in the “Not A Focus” into “Now” and some of them became “Never” items as we solidified our conviction in certain areas. 

The key here is just get this stuff down on paper in a succinct way that you can easily update as things evolve.

This was probably the most important hypothesis out of all of them - an under served market. 

At the time the market was flooded with bootcamps helping people get a job, and low quality courses on places like Udemy. 

Mid career professionals, people who already had a job, were under served, had a higher willingness to pay (access to company expense budgets), and didn’t have crazy outcome expectations. 

This lasted us for years, but others have caught on and the space has gotten more crowded.

This was also a key to getting out to a fast start. We focused on an underserved niche (Growth) within an underserved market (mid career professionals). Niche down to grow fast.

This hypothesis became true more quickly than I thought. Today product is our biggest audience but we also have things in core marketing and engineering. One thing that has become tough is that players have popped up in every function you can think of from sales to operations to finance.

All of these were important “anti-personas” for us. The two most important though were entry level professionals and the solopreneurs. 

The market was flooded with things for both those audiences and it just wasn’t a place we wanted to play.

This might not be apparent just from reading the doc, but these sections are purposefully ordered to answer the questions: 

- How are we going to make them aware of that solution? 

- How are we going to make money off the solution? 

- Who do we need to be defensible against? 

I think a lot of folks start with the solution but that leads to incomplete thinking. Those questions flow in a very specific way and if you aren’t clear about the specific audience and problem they have first, the rest doesn’t matter.

This was an insight that I had from working at HubSpot. We had a $5K per employee budget for professional development. Close to 1K employees. We still didn’t have the resources to build in house. 

In the MVP we had a bunch of positive reviews from folks at Google, Facebook, etc. If they couldn’t do it, then I knew no company would. 

 I would get from new hires, outsiders, investors was “You should create a program that places people in growth roles. That would be gold!” The problem with this is that serving the use case of taking someone from nothing to getting a job requires a 

 different experience. Not to mention, is incredibly difficult. At the time I had a hypothesis that you couldn’t take someone from no knowledge to getting a job in the timeline and at the cost that the customer wanted. That has played out to a certain degree with the fall of bootcamps but I actually hope someone figures out a 10X solution there. 

My point is though, outsiders are going to suggest the most common things. You as a founder need to be dialed in on the “hidden secret” as Peter Thiel would call it. 

Over time we’ve learned the important characteristic is more about it being applicable not just relevant. It’s not enough to be relevant but a person also needs to be able to put it into action.

This ended up being one of our key unlocks. We built a system that enabled us to work with C level operators that wouldn’t publish otherwise. 

Others in the space focused on tooling around influencers and existing creators that tended to be much earlier in their career and didn’t have the same experience or insights yet. 

This is one that has come slower than I would like. But I think we are getting there with the creation of this network.

This was another common suggestion from the peanut gallery - “you should sell certification for xyz role.” 

While it’s true that it was and still is a money making opportunity, I just don’t believe in my heart that it is what helps people get ahead in their career. 

At the end of the day, the only thing that moves you forward over a long career is 

The one I missed early on was how powerful word of mouth was going to be and how we could engineer things to amplify it even more. Word of mouth actually took over content marketing fairly quickly.

Did you know that Harvard Business School makes ≈$120M per year from selling case studies to other b schools? 🤯🤯🤯 

That is why I had this hypothesis at the time. But it is never something we fully went after. Conforming to the format of an MBA case study would have led us to creating non actionable content for our customers. The market just isn’t there unless we want to change what we value in the content.

For some of these I created a separate section called strategic questions. These were questions that felt important at the time that I didn’t have answers to. Rather than letting them slow you down, I just created a parking area for them to come back to. Interestingly, some of these questions are ones we still face today even though I saw them 7 years ago.

We were very premium priced on the market to begin with. This was enabled by our target audience being highly underserved and having high WTP for the solution. We kept this price point for the first 4 years of the business and it held pretty well. 

In 2020 we started to face a lot of competition and copycats which created more price pressure. That is when we moved to the all in one subscription model which increased value for the price. It ended up being a huge accelerant to the business in 2021.

This pricing obviously didn’t hold over the long term. I think it could have if we had narrowed in on a VP+ audience similar to what YPO or Chief does.

This was another common request we got (and still get). A lot of companies are trained to think “Oh this is a small company, I can get them to customize to my needs.” 

But we had a hypothesis that was an unscalable path for us so just kept saying no. 

Interestingly, the customer is rarely right on this one. Most companies thought they were a special snowflake. After teaching tons of Reforge courses and seeing inside thousands of companies' problems, I can tell you that this sentiment is wrong 99% of the time.

 the word community over time. It is one of those hot terms that means something different and therefore nothing all at the same time. Even when we ask our customers what community means to them, we get a million different responses. As a result this has been something that has been really hard to make actionable.

Defensibility is one area that our hypothesis was wrong. Brand has actually been our most defensible piece over network effects via community. The challenge is that Brand is the most fickle defensibility mechanism there is.

This has been an interesting challenge for us. We have a lot of members that learn a ton of Reforge but go to great lengths to make sure others don’t know they learned it from us. They want to look like they came up with it themselves. Humans 🤷‍♂️”

One of my strong beliefs is that startups should rarely think about competitors and most should think about alternatives. Alternatives are the other ways your target audience are solving the problem today. 

If you focus on competitors, you are likely to make three critical mistakes: 

- When competitors look at each other, they will gravitate towards the same features, the same messaging, even the same design. 

 - Alternatives typically have 10X to 1000X the usage of competitors. It is a much bigger ocean to fish in.

Brian Balfour

I created this canvas early in Reforge's history to document hypotheses, focus efforts, and structure the chaos of the early days.

Now, future, not a focus

Underserved market

Niche down to grow fast

Other verticals

Anti-personas

Insight from HubSpot

Most common suggestion

Applicable, not just relevant

Key unlock

Demonstration of skills

Accreditation

Word of mouth

Licensing partnerships

How do we draw the line between free content and the paid experience?

How do we compete in the world of HubSpot and other dominant content forces?

Premium pricing

Pricing didn't hold

Customized courses for enterprise

With a long purchase timeline that could take a year, how do we stay in touch and build awareness over time?

Business Hypothesis Canvas at Reforge

Reforge Business Hypothesis Canvas

Target Audience

Problem

Value Proposition

Distribution

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