SUMM

Many founders struggle with articulating their target customer and basic product details, often leading to misalignment
Two key failure modes: not knowing the basics and not testing assumptions
The Foundation Sprint is a 10-hour, highly scripted process for early-stage teams to achieve alignment on product fundamentals
Designed to clarify what is being built, for whom, how it's different, and how to test it quickly with customers
Originated from lessons learned during the development of Google's design sprint methodology
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky created the Foundation Sprint at Character Capital, iterating from their experience with design sprints at places like Google Ventures
The Foundation Sprint is positioned as a high-ROI activity, often providing months' worth of clarity and alignment in two days

Building too quickly, especially with AI tools, can result in generic products lacking meaningful differentiation
Slowing down to do deep thinking early on helps teams focus on what makes their product unique and avoids wasted future effort
Clearing the calendar for a focused sprint is rare but confers a major advantage by enabling better information and decision making

The Foundation Sprint lasts around 10 hours (spread over two days), followed by several weeks of design sprints to test hypotheses
Participants usually include co-founders or core leaders from product, engineering, design, and marketing
The sprint is divided into three phases:
- Basics: Define the customer, problem, competition, and current alternatives
- Differentiation: Identify what sets the team apart using specific advantages, insights, motivations, and capabilities
- Approach: Decide on the main implementation path and a backup plan
The result is a clear, testable founding hypothesis in a single sentence that the whole team aligns on

Teams use a "work alone together" method—everyone answers core questions in silence, then shares and votes
Questions include: Who is the key customer? What problem are we solving? Who are our competitors and what are user workarounds?
The process often reveals surprising differences in team members’ perspectives, prompting alignment
Clarity on the problem, competition, and unique advantages becomes the foundation for meaningful differentiation

Emphasis on being radically different, not just better
Differentiation should be defined from the customer’s perspective, not just the technology or market
Teams build classic and custom differentiators (e.g., fast vs. slow, easy to use vs. complicated, cooperative vs. siloed)
Use 2x2 matrices (“business school 101 diagrams”) to visually position the product against competitors—goal: get the product in the “top right” corner
Teams realize they don’t need to be best at everything—winning on 1-2 crucial differentiators is often enough

Case studies include Latchet (artisans selling online) and Melo (AI agents for everyday tasks)
Latchet identified “helps you grow” and “cooperative” as key differentiators versus Etsy and Shopify
Melo landed on “mobile first” and “works out of the box” against generalist AI tools
Scorecards and voting help teams honestly assess where they beat or lag behind competitors

Teams lay out all possible product approaches that would deliver the differentiated promise
Use “magic lenses”—different perspectives such as customer experience, speed to market, growth, financial health, and team conviction—to assess and compare approaches
Plotting options across lenses highlights trade-offs and helps select both a primary and backup plan
Having explicit alternatives and backup plans enables fast pivots if initial ideas don’t work

Building quickly with AI can tempt teams to skip key thinking steps, leading to generic offerings
Real customer data comes not just from those who try the product but also from those who ignore it—a prototype alone can’t reveal all
Slow down at the start to clarify differentiation and approach before unleashing AI and rapid prototyping

After the Foundation Sprint, teams conduct design sprints: prototype, test with customers, and score learning against the founding hypothesis
Use clear, criteria-based scorecards for each customer test (did the right customer experience the right problem? Does differentiation land? Would they choose this over competitors?)
Rapid cycling allows compressing months of learning into weeks—teams see measurable improvement in “click” with customers after each iteration
Hypotheses are refined each week based on customer feedback, leading towards a differentiated, validated product

The process isn’t mandatory if the product is already working (“product-market fit trumps process”)
Not all successful companies used this framework—but all successful launches examined had strong, explicit differentiation
The method is relatively new but draws on years of observation of what successful teams did in practice

AI is most valuable for speeding up prototyping, enabling non-designers to get to high-fidelity prototypes quickly
“Vibe coding”/LLMs can produce realistic mockups fast, but the thinking (clear copy, differentiation, customer insight) cannot be outsourced
Teams must plan thoroughly (e.g., detailed sketches, thought-out user journeys) before relying on AI to prototype

The Foundation Sprint brings teams closer to both their customers (through repeated, structured testing) and each other (by forcing alignment and open decision-making)
A freely available Miro template allows any team to run their own Foundation Sprint
Further information and applications to Character Labs can be found at character.vc
The underlying goal: take a day or two to clarify what matters, test rigorously, and optimize product-building speed and efficacy for long-term success

The framework streamlines a daunting, ambiguous phase of startup building into a repeatable, motivating, and high-ROI process
Focus on beginnings yields better teamwork, stronger customer connections, and greater motivation through clarity and progress
Guidance and templates available for anyone who wants to try this approach at home

Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint