Most validation checklists are a set of good questions in no particular order, which means people answer the interesting ones first. The order is worth more than the items.
The ordering rule: sort by what it costs to answer honestly — not by difficulty, and not by importance. An afternoon of desk research settles whether a problem is documented. It takes months to discover you cannot reach the buyer. So the cheap eliminations go first, and most ideas never reach the expensive questions at all.
The temptation runs the other way, and it is strong. The expensive questions are the interesting ones, they feel like real work, and answering them produces artefacts you can show people. Cost order is dull, and it is the only ordering that saves anything.
An implementation detail that caught us in review: there are two lists, not one. A candidate our own sourcing produced runs through 10 checks. An idea a user brings runs through 12. Publishing either one as the checklist was wrong in both directions.
The differences are not cosmetic. The user-idea list adds two the sourced one has no business asking — whether the thing pays for itself inside a year, and whether it could ever be sold or handed off — because those are questions about a business you intend to run.
And it deliberately does not apply the documented-problem anchor at all. There is no corpus to anchor a pasted idea against, so demanding one would kill every idea for the crime of arriving from outside. That asymmetry is the kind of thing a single shared list quietly gets wrong.
Now the part that makes it falsifiable. A checklist is a claim about what you would reject, so we counted one published run: 69 candidates, 36 dropped, each with the check that did it.
The most common cause of death is the absence of a documented problem — 21 of the 36, more than twice the next reason at 9. That is the first question on the list and the cheapest one to answer, which is the argument for cost order made by the data rather than by us.
The awkward number is in the same census. Those rows add to 57 reasons against 36 dead ideas, because most failed more than one check. The rows do not partition the drops, and a weak idea is usually weak in several directions at once — worth knowing if you were hoping that answering the one objection you have heard would rescue yours.
What a checklist cannot do is tell you an idea is good. Every check is a way of failing, and passing all of them means only that no known deal-breaker was found. That is a licence to run a real test, not a verdict.
Both lists in full, and the census: https://whittleos.com/guides/startup-idea-validation-checklist
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