6 Market Dynamics
Six Market Dynamics scores a startup idea against six forces - customer, product, timing, competition, financial, team - so a good idea in a weak market gets caught before the money and time are spent.
Six named forces spread across the page as individual cards, scored one at a time before being weighed together.
Reach for this when…
- You have an idea and can't tell whether the market itself makes it worth pursuing, or just the idea.
- You're about to raise money or leave a job for this and want more than gut feel behind the decision.
- An idea keeps almost working and you can't say which of the six forces is actually working against you.
How to run it
- Score the customer and product dynamics: is there a real unmet need, and will people actually adopt what you're proposing?
- Score the timing and competition dynamics: is there a recent enabler and a genuine market inefficiency, with room to build a defensible position?
- Score the financial and team dynamics: low sunk costs and a path to scale, backed by the expertise this market actually needs.
- Weigh the six together rather than separately - they interact, so a strong product can't rescue bad timing.
- Flag the one or two dynamics that are genuinely weak and decide whether they're fixable before you commit.
A worked example
Situation. Rodrigo Quispe was building a subscription meal-kit service in La Paz, Bolivia, convinced the product alone would carry the business.
Applied. Scoring it against the six dynamics, product and team came out strong, but timing was weak - reliable refrigerated delivery across the city was still years off - and competition was crowded, with three funded rivals already fighting on price.
Result. He shelved the citywide meal-kit idea and narrowed to office lunch delivery in a single business district, where timing and competition both scored far better, and reached profitability inside a year.
The catch
It's a self-scoring exercise, so a founder who loves their own idea will often score it generously - it works best with an outside voice in the room, not alone. It was built for online and startup ventures specifically, so a few of the criteria, like sunk costs and adoption barriers, translate awkwardly to an established business adding a new line. And six strong scores only says the market is favourable, not that execution will go to plan.
A strong score on five dynamics doesn't rescue a business built on a market that was never really there.
Origin: Neal Cabage