Guide: A Structured Prompt Stack to Quickly Evaluate Startup Ideas
Overview
A seasoned marketing professional with Fortune 100 experience, startup leadership, and exposure to top-tier strategy workshops shares a robust, repeatable approach for understanding any market: a blend of targeted research, discipline, and MBA-minded thinking. By refining this process with GPT, you can push collaborators to be brutally honest about their market, identify true gaps, and sharpen positioning. The method uses a series of prompts designed to reveal what might be missing in an analysis and to guide strategic thinking without making decisions for you.
How it works
– You can run this entirely in ChatGPT (GPT-4o recommended).
– The prompts do not automate decisions; they surface overlooked factors and provide structured feedback to improve your analysis.
– Ready-to-use framework: fill in your specific business details and work through the prompts to align on market reality, customer definitions, and value propositions.
Prompt 1: Marketing strategist role with ongoing memory
– Role: Act as marketing strategist, growth specialist, creative director, and positioning expert.
– Behavior: Think critically, speak in practical terms with full acronym explanations, challenge assumptions, provide structured feedback, and teach after each output.
– Long-term memory: Commit a basic business profile to memory, then build on each insight to refine results.
– Skill level tailoring: Use appropriate technical language for your stated skill level (BEGINNER/INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED). Provide teachable notes throughout.
– Prohibitions: Do not suggest the next prompts outright.
Prompt 2: Market Reality Evaluator
– Mode: Deactivate softening of bad news; rely on credible public data (2023+), inference, and structured business logic.
– Task: Evaluate the market you sell into, determine if it’s worth entering.
– Inputs: One-line product summary, target audience, optional edge data (competitor prices, COGS, ad costs, performance signals, etc.), optional pricing.
– Deliverables: A comprehensive market assessment covering TAM, category maturity, saturation, dominant players, market growth, buyer sophistication, purchase frequency, pricing ceiling, viable acquisition channels, estimated CAC ranges, CLV targets, strategic opportunity mode (Steal/Expand/Defend/Stimulate), overall difficulty, and a clear Go/No-Go recommendation with brief reasoning.
– Bonus if you provide margin data: model profit per sale, breakeven CAC, and minimum conversion rate needed from ads.
Prompt 3: Ideal Customer Definition
– Frameworks: Choose the most relevant from Jobs to Be Done, Buyer Persona, First Principles (Hormozi), Awareness Levels (Schwartz), Brand Archetypes, Traffic Temperature, and Empathy Map, depending on business type.
– Output focus: Demographics (if meaningful), Psychographics, Core Frustrations, Primary Goals, Current Alternatives, Resonant Messaging.
– Optional labeling: Tag sections with the guiding framework.
– Note: Do not repeat product details; focus entirely on the customer.
Prompt 4: Value Propositions (3 variants, under 20 words each)
– Structure: “We help [AUDIENCE] go from [BEFORE STATE] to [AFTER STATE] using [PRODUCT].”
– Format: Three variations.
– Guidance: Tailor tone and depth based on business type (SaaS/B2B, DTC/brand-led, high-ticket B2B, content/influencer-led) using a modular framework (Hormozi, Dunford, Brand Archetypes, etc.).
Prompt 5: Competitive Strategy Analysis
– Task: Act as Competitive Strategy Analyst.
– Inputs: Three primary competitors and their websites.
– Deliverables:
– Analyze each competitor’s homepage and messaging.
– Summarize primary value proposition, axis of competition, and target persona.
– Propose three unclaimed or under-leveraged positioning axes, with details for each axis (emotional benefit, target audience, proof method, etc.).
– Provide a closing recommendation on which axis to pursue first and why.
– Bonus: Suggest a sharp one-liner for the wedge.
Prompt 6: GTM Mode Selector (Post-Chapters 1–4)
– Task: Determine the most viable GTM mode (Steal, Expand, Defend, Stimulate) based on prior outputs (market, pricing, positioning, TAM, revenue, growth, CAC).
– Deliverables:
1) Most viable GTM mode (strategic rationale, not tactics).
2) What to optimize for in Part 2 (speed vs margin, awareness vs conversion, breadth vs depth of messaging).
3) Modes to avoid and why.
4) Difficulty rating (1–10) with strategic blind spots.
– Note: Do not provide tactical recommendations here; hold for execution chapters.
Closing thoughts
This framework distills a long career into a practical, AI-assisted workflow intended to surface gaps, validate market potential, and align on a clear strategic path. It emphasizes honest market assessment, customer-centric positioning, and disciplined investment considerations. If you want, I can adapt these prompts into a single, ready-to-run worksheet or a WordPress blog post that guides readers through each stage with examples and fill-in fields.
