AI Blocks › Test an idea before you build it
Find out which parts of your plan are guesses, and test them with customers
Give it your business plan. Get testable guesses, an interview plan and the smallest test of the riskiest guess.
Turn your plan into guesses and test them with customers is a free AI workflow for the job "Test an idea before you build it". It guides your AI through several skills in order, passing each step's output to the next.
Free · No account · Made by AI Blocks · Thinking: high
What it does
A business plan reads like a set of facts, but most of it is guesses about who the customers are, what they will pay and how they will hear of you. Teams spend months building to the plan and learn too late that a guess was wrong. This workflow turns each part of the plan into a guess you can test. It orders them by risk and pairs each with a cheap test and a pass line. Then it plans the conversations to have with customers, with questions about what people do now and not about your product. You go and have the talks. Back in the workflow, it uses what you heard to plan the smallest test of the riskiest guess and a rule for whether to change direction. The method comes from Steve Blank's Customer Development Manifesto.
You give it
- Your business plan or a short brief on the idea
- Who you think the customers are and how you plan to reach them
- Notes from your customer talks, for the last step
- A week or two for the talks
You get
- A one-page version of the plan with every box turned into a guess, ordered by risk, each with a cheap test and a pass line
- A conversation plan with which guess each talk tests, who to talk to, and questions about what people do now
- The riskiest guess, the smallest test to try next and a rule for changing direction or keeping going
Use it when
- You have a business plan on paper and haven't yet tested any of it on real customers.
- You are about to hire sales or marketing staff before you know who buys and why.
- You have talked to a few people but never wrote down what you were trying to learn.
Steps
- Business model assumption tester: Paste your plan. Get it rewritten as testable guesses on one page, with a test and a pass line for each.
- Customer discovery interview planner: Paste your business idea. Get your guesses, who to talk to and questions that test them outside the building.
- MVP experiment planner: Paste your product idea. Get the riskiest guess, the smallest test and a pivot or persevere rule.
How to use it
- Download the handoff pack. It's a zip with HANDOFF.md and every skill file this workflow uses.
- Give the folder to Claude (in Claude Code, or as files in a Claude Project) and say "Follow HANDOFF.md".
- Give it your plan or brief. It runs steps 1 and 2 and stops.
- Talk to customers about each guess, and write notes straight after each talk.
- Bring the notes back and say "carry on from step 3".