1. You have at least 8-10 years of experience in that domain with some of it in a leadership position (ie product manager)
2. You already have a huge following or audience. Especially important if this is a SaaS product or b2c. Not as important if this is hard tech (ie biotech).
But if you’re doing a HR startup, show me your 10,000 engaged HR followers on LinkedIn. If you’re doing a martech startup, show me your Substack with 10k marketing subscribers.
3. You already have talked to at least 25 people about this, and gotten feedback about their pain points, initial reaction to your solution, etc. These conversations are documented and easily shared with me
4. You preferably have at least 1 successful exit/company under your belt, or a couple of failed ones is OK too (but I would need references to make sure they failed for legitimate reasons) the worse is 0 years of experience starting a company.
5. You are a cold email/call/outreach junkie. Because you will OWN sales in the early days. I want to see your 100 send emails or 100 daily calls or 100 sent DMs everyday asking potential customers for feedback or validation conversations or to sign up for your beta