Extreme Questions to Trigger New, Better Ideas

What if it didn’t matter how unprofitable you were?

Maybe prices stay the same but you can spend 10x or 100x more, even if that’s wildly unprofitable. Or maybe the product is free, too. How would you spend the money? How much value could you deliver, if you thought of the product as an exercise in philanthropy?

If you were forced to increase your prices by 10x, what would you have to do to justify it?

What sort of brand looks and feels like something that expensive? What positioning would you take? How would the design of both the website and the product need to change?

If our biggest competitor copied every single feature we have, how would we still win?

If you were never allowed to provide tech support, in any form, what would have to change?

How would on-boarding need to be improved, to the point where customers would self-serve and be happy doing it?

If the answer is outside of our product, where is it? A higher purpose or brand-promise that our customers buy into, aside from the product? Is that because we are good at communicating how we make the world better, or because our customers are “rooting for David against Goliath,” or how our culture is special, or because our brand is distinctive (

If all our customers vanished, and we had to earn our growth and brand from scratch, what would we do?

How would we distinguish ourselves with a unique compelling message, as a fresh competitor in our market? What would we put on our home page? Would we use a different pricing model to compete better? Would our brand need to change to align with the