Mullins' Seven Domains Model
Mullins' Seven Domains Model tests a new venture across market, industry and team, because a market that's genuinely attractive still fails if the team can't execute it or lacks the connections to move fast.
Seven spokes fan out from the venture at the centre, one per test it has to pass.
Reach for this when…
- You're deciding whether to back a new venture, not just judge the idea.
- Everyone's excited about the market size and nobody's checked if this team can win it.
- The financials look fine on a spreadsheet but the industry structure hasn't been examined.
How to run it
- Test the macro market: is there real, sizeable customer need and is it growing?
- Test the target segment: is this specific slice of the market attractive to serve?
- Test the industry structure: are the competitive forces survivable?
- Test the sustainable edge: is whatever advantage they have defensible for long enough to matter?
- Test the team's mission and appetite for risk: does what they want from this match what the venture will actually demand of them?
- Test the team's ability to execute: can this specific team execute against what the opportunity requires?
- Test the connections: does the team have relationships up and down the value chain to move fast?
A worked example
Situation. Lukas Van Damme was raising money in Ghent, Belgium, for "SnelRoute," a last-mile delivery routing SaaS, on the strength of a huge addressable market slide.
Applied. Running the seven domains, the market and segment tests held up, but the team domain exposed a gap: nobody on the founding team had ever sold into logistics operators, and the connections domain showed no existing relationships with the regional carriers who'd have to adopt it.
Result. Before raising further, Lukas hired a co-founder from a logistics background with those relationships already in place. The next investor conversation was shorter, because the team gap was closed rather than argued around.
The catch
Seven domains is thorough enough that teams run it once, tick every box, and never revisit it as the venture and market change. It also rewards a team that scores well on paper over one that's actually fast and resourceful in the field.
A brilliant market with the wrong team is still a bad bet. The model exists partly to stop market size alone from carrying the decision.
Origin: John Mullins