DEV Community: Ido Barkan

AI Business Advisors Compared: What Each Format Does

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:34:09 +0000

The label covers at least four distinct formats. They fail in different ways, so the useful
comparison is structural rather than brand by brand.

Format 1: the general assistant

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and similar. Extremely capable, broad, effectively free.

Good for: a specific question with a knowable answer. Drafting. Explaining
something unfamiliar. Working through a calculation.

Fails at: anything requiring continuity. It does not remember your business
between sessions, so advice never compounds and you re-explain context every time. It also
converges toward the reasonable middle, which is exactly wrong for decisions where the whole
question is which extreme to accept.

Format 2: the AI coach

Products built around a coaching methodology, often with goal tracking and check ins.

Good for: accountability and habit. Regular prompting to review what you
said you would do.

Fails at: hard analytical calls. Coaching frameworks are built to draw
answers out of you, which assumes you have the answer. Sometimes you do not, and being asked
what you think about it repeatedly is not useful.

Format 3: the specialist tool

Narrow products for pricing, financial modelling, competitive research, or marketing
analysis.

Good for: depth in one domain. Better than any generalist inside its
boundary.

Fails at: the cross functional question, which is what most real decisions
are. Whether to open a second location is simultaneously financial, operational, and personal.
Every specialist answers its own slice confidently and none owns the whole.

Format 4: the AI board

Several persistent advisors with conflicting frameworks, meeting on a schedule, ending in a
recorded decision.

Good for: consequential decisions with real tradeoffs, where you need to see
the strongest version of each side rather than a blended recommendation. Also for the ongoing
accountability of a fixed cadence.

Fails at: speed. The format is overhead for a question with a knowable
answer. It also cannot supply what makes real boards powerful: genuine accountability, a
network, and people with a stake in the outcome.

Choosing by question, not by product

What you are facing	Format that fits
A factual or technical question	General assistant
You know what to do and are not doing it	AI coach, or a peer group
A deep question inside one domain	Specialist tool
A tradeoff with no clean answer	AI board
You need introductions or capital	None of these. You need people.

What no AI format currently provides

Worth being direct about the ceiling. None of these has a stake in your outcome, can make an
introduction, can invest, or can remove you when you are the problem. Those are the things real
advisors provide and no current product substitutes for them.

What AI formats do provide is availability, patience, and a willingness to argue at eleven at
night about a decision you cannot discuss with your team. For a large number of business owners
who have no board and never will, that gap is worth closing even though it is not the same
thing.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/ai-business-advisor-comparison.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

Business Advice for Solo Founders

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:33:51 +0000

Solo founders usually describe their problem as capacity. Too much to do, not enough hours.
That is real, and it is not the thing that damages the business most. The thing that damages the
business most is that every decision goes unchallenged.

A co-founder is not primarily extra labour. A co-founder is the person who says that does not
make sense at the moment it does not make sense. Removing that role removes an error correction
mechanism, and the errors do not announce themselves.

What actually degrades without a counterpart

Bad ideas survive longer. Nothing kills a weak idea early, so it consumes
months before reality does the job.
Confidence stops tracking evidence. With nobody pushing back, certainty
grows on its own schedule.
Avoidance becomes invisible. The task you have not done in six weeks is
usually the important one. A counterpart notices. Alone, nobody does.
Small decisions expand to fill the space. Without someone to say this does
not matter, everything feels equally weighty.

Replacing the function deliberately

You cannot manufacture a co-founder, but the function can be partly rebuilt. The key is
choosing sources that have no reason to keep you comfortable.

Write to yourself in advance, not in hindsight

Before a significant decision, write what you expect and what would prove you wrong. Reread it
in a month. This is the cheapest available substitute for an outside view and the most reliably
skipped.

Find one honest peer, not a supportive group

One founder at a similar stage who will tell you something is a bad idea is worth more than a
community of encouragement. Encouragement is abundant and nearly worthless as an input.

Ask people who are wrong for you

Deliberately consult someone whose instincts differ from yours. If you are cautious, ask
someone aggressive. The point is not to follow them. It is to hear the version of the argument
you would never generate alone.

Separate the decision from the reassurance

Notice which one you are seeking. Both are legitimate needs, but conflating them means you
ask for advice and hear only agreement. It is fine to want reassurance. Just do not confuse it
with a second opinion.

The isolation is not a character flaw

Founders often treat needing outside perspective as weakness, which is why the deficit
persists. Every large company puts a board above the chief executive precisely because unchecked
judgment degrades. The structure exists because the problem is universal, not because particular
people are deficient.

Running a business alone means you have taken on a role that organisations deliberately never
leave unsupervised. Building some form of counterweight is not an admission of inadequacy, it is
the same correction every serious company makes.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/business-advice-for-solo-founders.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

Does My Small Business Need a Board of Directors?

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:33:32 +0000

Two questions get merged here and they have different answers. Whether you need a legal board
of directors is mostly about your corporate structure and investors. Whether you need governance,
meaning outside judgment applied to your decisions on a regular schedule, is a question almost
every owner should answer yes to.

The formal board

A statutory board carries legal duties, fiduciary responsibility, and real authority including
the power to remove the chief executive. If you have taken institutional investment you likely
already have one, and it was not optional. If you are an owner operator with no outside capital,
a formal board usually adds cost and constraint without adding much.

What you probably do need

Strip away the legal structure and a board provides four things. These are what is actually
scarce.

Outside judgment. Someone competent who is not inside your assumptions.
A schedule. Forced review at a fixed interval, so problems surface before
they become urgent.
Accountability. Having said out loud what you would do, and being asked
about it.
Structured conflict. Several informed views deliberately kept apart rather
than blended into consensus.

You can obtain all four without incorporating anything.

The options between nothing and a real board

Option	Cost	Gives you	Limits
Advisory board	Equity or fees, plus real recruiting effort	Genuine expertise, network, accountability	Hard to attract at small scale, slow to assemble
Peer group or mastermind	Membership fee	Accountability, shared context	Peers share your blind spots and experience ceiling
Single advisor or coach	Hourly or retainer	Depth, continuity	One perspective, no structured conflict
Fractional executive	Monthly fee	Operating expertise in one function	Functional rather than whole business view
AI board	Software pricing	Schedule, conflicting frameworks, persistence, availability	No real accountability, no network, no stake in your outcome

How to tell which one you need

Three questions usually resolve it.

Are your decisions currently unchallenged? If nobody has told you that you
were wrong in the last six months, that is the gap, and almost any option above closes it.

Do you need a network, or a mirror? If what you actually need is
introductions, capital, or credibility by association, only real humans provide that and you
should invest the effort in a genuine advisory board. If you need your own reasoning tested, the
cheaper options do that well.

Will you show up? The most common failure is not choosing wrongly, it is
assembling something and then not using it. A structure with a fixed cadence beats a better
structure you engage with sporadically.

The honest summary

Formal boards exist to protect investors. Governance exists to protect the business from the
narrowing judgment of the person running it. If you have no investors, you can skip the first
and should not skip the second.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/do-i-need-a-board-of-directors.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

How to Make Better Business Decisions

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:33:13 +0000

Most owners try to improve decisions by gathering more information. Past a fairly low
threshold this stops helping and starts hurting, because additional data mostly gets recruited
to support the position you already hold. What actually improves outcomes is structural.

1. Separate reversible decisions from irreversible ones

Most decisions can be undone at modest cost, and should be made fast. A small number cannot,
and deserve real deliberation. Treating both alike is the most common process failure: owners
agonise over reversible choices and rush the permanent ones because those arrive with
urgency.

Ask first: if this is wrong, what does it cost to reverse? The answer sets how much process
the decision earns.

2. Write the decision down before you make it

Record what you are deciding, what you expect to happen, and what would tell you that you were
wrong. This takes ten minutes and does two things. It exposes reasoning that felt solid until it
had to be written in sentences. And it creates a record that defeats hindsight bias later, since
memory reliably rewrites what you expected to match what occurred.

3. Name what would change your mind, in advance

Before committing, state the evidence that would prove the decision wrong. If you cannot name
any, you are not making a decision, you are defending a conclusion. Doing this beforehand is what
lets you actually change course later without it feeling like a personal defeat.

4. Get disagreement from someone with no stake in your comfort

This is the practice most owners skip, and it is the one that matters most. Your team has
incentives. Your friends want to be supportive. Your customers see one facet. What you need is
someone competent who has no reason to protect your preferred answer.

The value is not that they know more. It is that they have no reason to agree.

5. Set a decision date and hold it

Not deciding is a decision, made by default and usually badly. Indefinite deliberation feels
like diligence while the option quietly expires. Set the date when you frame the question, then
decide on it with what you have.

6. Review outcomes against what you wrote

Once a quarter, reread your decision records and compare them to what actually happened. Look
for patterns rather than individual errors. Most owners have two or three recurring biases, and
seeing yours named in your own handwriting changes behaviour in a way that general advice does
not.

The trap underneath all of it

Almost every owner who describes a decision as difficult has already chosen. What they are
looking for is not analysis, it is permission, or the reassurance of someone confirming it.
That is a human and understandable thing to want. It is also why so much advice seeking produces
no change in behaviour.

A useful test: notice how you feel when someone argues against your leaning. If the reaction
is relief at finding a flaw, you were genuinely deciding. If it is irritation and a search for
counterarguments, you had already decided and are shopping for agreement.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/how-to-make-better-business-decisions.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

Should I Raise My Prices? How to Decide

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:32:54 +0000

Price is the fastest lever in any business and the one owners touch least. A ten percent
increase that customers absorb goes almost entirely to profit, because the costs are already
paid. The same ten percent in new revenue costs you acquisition spend, delivery, and support.
Nothing else on the board moves the number that efficiently.

So the honest question is usually not whether to raise prices. It is why you have not.

Five signals you are underpriced

You almost never lose a deal on price. If price is rarely the objection, you
are not testing the ceiling. Losing some deals on price is a sign you found the edge.
Customers say yes too quickly. A frictionless yes usually means the number
was below what they had budgeted.
You have absorbed cost increases without repricing. Many businesses have not
adjusted since their costs rose, which is a real price cut taken quietly.
Your worst customers are your cheapest. Low prices select for demanding, low
commitment buyers. This is the most reliable signal of all.
You feel anxious reading this section. Reluctance to raise prices is
usually about the owner, not the market.

The real objection is rarely economic

Ask an owner why they have not raised prices and you get market reasoning: customers will
leave, competitors are cheaper, it is a tough year. Push once and you usually reach something
else. They do not want the conversation. They do not want to be told the thing they built is
not worth more.

That is a legitimate human feeling and a poor pricing input. It is worth separating the two
explicitly, because the market question has an answer and the personal one is not really about
price.

How to move without breaking anything

New customers first. Raise for new business only and leave existing
customers untouched. You get clean data with no relationship risk.
Make the increase meaningful. Three percent tells you nothing and annoys
people. Ten to twenty percent produces a readable signal.
Watch conversion, not complaints. Complaints are loud and unrepresentative.
Conversion rate is the measurement.
Give existing customers notice and a reason. When you do reprice the base,
sixty days notice and a straight explanation retains far better than a quiet change.
Expect to lose a few. Losing your most price sensitive customers is usually
a margin improvement and a support load reduction at once.

When not to raise prices

The advice is not universal. Hold if you are in a genuine land grab where market share
compounds and the winner takes the category. Hold if your retention is already weak, because
price increases accelerate churn that was going to happen anyway and you will misread the cause.
Hold if you have just had a serious quality or service failure, since the sequence matters.

In every other case the question worth sitting with is not whether the market will bear a
higher price. It is what you would do differently if you knew it would.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/should-i-raise-my-prices.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

Should I Raise Venture Capital or Bootstrap?

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:32:35 +0000

The framing that causes the most damage is treating this as a financing decision. It is not.
Taking venture money is choosing a category of business: one that must attempt to become very
large very quickly, and produce an exit that returns a fund. Everything else follows from
that.

What venture capital actually requires

A venture fund needs a small number of investments to return the entire fund. That structure
means a company growing steadily and profitably at twenty percent a year is a failure in a
venture portfolio, even though it is an excellent business by any other measure.

Once you take the money, that expectation becomes your operating constraint. Decisions that
would be obviously correct for a durable business, such as slowing hiring to protect margin,
become hard to defend.

Questions that actually decide it

Can this business plausibly become very large?

Not "could it grow", but could it realistically reach a scale where a meaningful ownership
stake is worth a large multiple of the money invested. Most good businesses cannot, and that is
not a criticism of them.

Does speed determine who wins here?

In some markets the first company to reach scale takes most of the value, usually where
network effects or heavy switching costs exist. In those markets, refusing capital while a
competitor takes it is a decision to lose. In most markets this dynamic does not apply, and
speed bought with dilution buys nothing durable.

Do you want to run this for a decade and then sell it?

Venture capital has an implicit ending. The fund needs liquidity. If you want to own a
profitable business indefinitely, you want a fundamentally different structure and should say so
before, not after.

Is capital genuinely your constraint?

Founders often raise to solve problems money does not solve. If you have not found product
market fit, capital lets you be wrong more expensively and for longer. If distribution is
unproven, funding scales an unproven motion.

The honest tradeoff

	Venture backed	Bootstrapped
Speed	Buy time and headcount immediately	Constrained by cash generated
Ownership	Diluted, and the dilution compounds each round	Retained
Control	Shared, with board seats and preferences	Yours
Acceptable outcome	Very large or nothing	Wide range, including modest and excellent
Failure mode	Scaling something that does not work	Being outrun in a market where speed wins

The middle path most people forget

The choice is often presented as binary and is not. Revenue based financing, customer
prepayment, a bank facility, a strategic partner, or simply raising a smaller amount from angels
who do not need fund returning outcomes all exist. They are less discussed because they generate
no press, not because they are worse.

The clarifying question is this: if you knew you could never raise, what would you build? If
the answer is a business you would be glad to own, you have learned that venture capital is
optional for you, which is a much stronger position from which to consider it.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/should-i-raise-venture-capital.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

What Is an AI Board of Directors?

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:32:16 +0000

An AI board of directors is a standing group of AI advisors that meets on a recurring
schedule to review a business, question its owner, deliberate among themselves, and vote on a
decision. The format is deliberately borrowed from a real board rather than from a chat
interface.

Three properties that define the format

Not every AI tool that gives business advice is a board. Three properties separate the
format from a general assistant, and all three have to be present.

1. Persistence

The board carries knowledge of your company forward. Your industry, your stage, the decision
you made six weeks ago and how it turned out. A general assistant starts every conversation
from zero, which means you spend the first ten minutes re-explaining your business and the
advice never compounds.

2. Structured disagreement

The advisors hold genuinely conflicting frameworks. Someone reasoning from capital
preservation and someone reasoning from speed of growth will not agree about the same expansion
decision, and they should not. A single AI answer averages those positions into something
reasonable and useless. A board keeps them apart so you can see the actual tradeoff.

3. Forced resolution

The session ends in a recorded decision with stated reasons. Open ended conversation is
comfortable and decides nothing. The value of a real board is partly that it makes you commit
in front of witnesses.

How it differs from things it resembles

Option	What it gives you	What it lacks
General AI assistant	Fast, broad, free	No memory across sessions, one averaged voice, never forces a decision
Business coach	One experienced human perspective, accountability	Single viewpoint, hourly cost, scheduling
Real advisory board	Genuine expertise and accountability	Equity or fees, recruiting difficulty, politics, out of reach for small companies
Mastermind group	Peer accountability, shared context	Peers share your blind spots and your experience ceiling
AI board of directors	Persistent memory, conflicting expert frameworks, a forced vote	Simulated rather than real judgment, no accountability with teeth, no network

What the format genuinely cannot do

Worth stating plainly, because the honest limits are the useful part.

It carries no real accountability. A real board can remove you. An AI board
cannot, and that changes how seriously most people take it.
It has no network. A real advisor makes introductions, opens doors, and
calls someone on your behalf. No AI does this.
It has no stake. Nobody on an AI board loses money if you fail, which is
part of why real advice from invested people carries weight.
It reasons from public material. Personas are built from what a leader
wrote and said publicly, which is not the same as how they actually decided behind closed
doors.

What the format does well is a narrower thing: it makes the tradeoff in a decision visible,
on a schedule, for a business too small to attract a real board. That is a real gap, and it is
the gap the format fills.

Who it suits

It suits owners who are making consequential calls alone and have nobody qualified to argue
with. That is most small business owners, most solo founders, and a surprising number of
executives who cannot show uncertainty to their own team.

It does not suit someone who wants a fast answer to a narrow question. For that, a general
assistant is quicker and the board format is overhead.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/what-is-an-ai-board-of-directors.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

What Would Warren Buffett Say About Your Business?

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:31:57 +0000

Buffett has written publicly for over sixty years, mostly in annual letters to Berkshire
Hathaway shareholders. Read enough of them and the reasoning is strikingly repetitive, which is
the point. A small set of questions, applied relentlessly.

These are the ones that transfer to an operating business rather than to stock selection.

1. What stops someone from doing this cheaper?

His term is the moat. The underlying question is unsentimental: if a well funded competitor
decided to take your customers tomorrow, what actually stops them? Acceptable answers include
switching costs, brand that permits higher pricing, scale advantages, and network effects.
Working harder is not an answer. Caring more is not an answer.

Most owners, asked this directly, describe their service quality. Buffett's writing treats
that as the absence of a moat rather than one, since it depends entirely on continued
effort.

2. Can you raise prices without losing customers?

He has called this the single most important measure of a business. Pricing power is the
observable evidence that a moat exists. Everything else is a story about a moat.

It is also a test you can run this month rather than theorise about. See
should I raise my prices.

3. Would you be comfortable owning this for ten years without selling?

Not a question about intention to sell. A test of whether you believe the business is durable.
Owners often discover that they are managing something they quietly expect to decline, which is
a strategic position worth making explicit rather than leaving unexamined.

4. How much cash must you put in to grow?

A recurring theme in his letters is that growth is only valuable when it does not consume all
the cash it produces. Businesses that must fund inventory, equipment, or working capital ahead of
every increase in revenue can grow steadily and enrich nobody. Growth is not automatically good,
which is a genuinely uncomfortable idea for most founders.

5. Is this inside what you actually understand?

His circle of competence idea is usually cited as modesty. It is closer to risk management.
The claim is not that you should stay small, it is that you should know precisely where the
boundary of your understanding sits, because that is where losses come from.

6. What would have to be true for this to fail completely?

He inverts constantly, a habit he credits to Charlie Munger. Rather than asking how to
succeed, ask what would guarantee failure, then avoid those things. It is a more tractable
question, since the routes to failure are fewer and more visible than the routes to success.

The obvious caveat

Buffett is an investor evaluating businesses from the outside, not an operator building one.
Some of this transfers imperfectly. A young company deliberately spending ahead of revenue to
capture a market is doing something his framework treats sceptically and which is sometimes
exactly right.

The value is not in adopting the framework wholesale. It is that these questions are
uncomfortable in a specific direction, toward durability and away from momentum, and most owners
lean the other way. Running your business through a framework that disagrees with your instincts
is the point.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/what-would-warren-buffett-say-about-my-business.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

When Should I Make My First Hire?

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:31:39 +0000

The usual trigger for a first hire is exhaustion. That is understandable and it is a poor
signal, because it tells you that you are busy without telling you what you are busy with.
Plenty of overwhelmed owners hire and stay overwhelmed, having added management overhead to the
original problem.

The test that works

Hire when a specific, named constraint is demonstrably costing you more than the fully loaded
cost of the person who would remove it.

Three parts, all required. Specific, meaning you can describe the work in a
sentence. Costing you, meaning you can point at revenue lost or opportunity
foregone. More than the salary, including payroll costs, tools, and the
management time you will spend, which owners routinely underestimate.

If you cannot complete that sentence, you have a prioritisation problem rather than a capacity
problem, and hiring will not fix it.

Find out where the time actually goes first

Log your time for one week in rough blocks. Nearly every owner is surprised, and the surprise
usually falls into one of three patterns.

Most hours in low value repetitive work. The clearest case for hiring, and
often the case for automating instead.
Most hours in work only you can do. Hiring will not help directly. Something
must be removed from your plate elsewhere to create room.
Hours scattered with no pattern. This is a focus problem. A hire will
inherit the chaos and amplify it.

What to hire first

The instinct is to hire someone like yourself, which feels comfortable and rarely helps.
Better options, roughly in order of how often they are correct:

The thing you are worst at that the business needs constantly. Usually
bookkeeping, operations, or fulfilment. Unglamorous and high return.
The thing that generates revenue that you personally bottleneck. If you are
the only person who can sell, that ceiling is your revenue ceiling.
The thing you hate. Not a joke. Work you avoid gets done late and badly,
and the cost of that is real but invisible.

Hire last for work that is strategic, judgment heavy, or defines the character of the
business. That work is genuinely hard to delegate early and delegating it badly is expensive.

Contractor before employee, usually

For a first hire, a contractor or part time arrangement is often the better structure. You
learn whether the role is real, you learn whether you can manage someone, and you can reverse the
decision cheaply if you were wrong about either. Many owners discover that the constraint they
identified was not the actual constraint, and finding that out at contractor cost is
considerably better than finding it out at employment cost.

The question underneath

Before hiring, it is worth asking whether you want a bigger business or a better one. These
diverge more often than people expect. A first hire moves you toward the first, and if what you
actually wanted was the second, pricing, focus, and dropping unprofitable work get you there
without adding a person.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/when-should-i-hire.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

Why Isn't My Business Growing? A Diagnostic

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:31:18 +0000

Flat revenue is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The instinct is to reach for the most visible
lever, usually marketing spend, and that is right maybe a third of the time. Work through these
in order, because the cheap tests come first and each one rules out the next.

1. You are acquiring customers who were never going to stay

Look at retention by cohort before you look at anything else. If customers acquired six
months ago are mostly gone, growth is a bucket problem and no amount of pouring fixes it. More
marketing spend into a leaking bucket accelerates the loss.

Test: pull retention curves by month of acquisition. If the curve never
flattens, stop and fix the product or the customer fit before spending another currency unit on
acquisition.

2. You are priced where nobody has to decide

Underpricing looks like a growth strategy and behaves like a tax. It attracts the least
committed customers, starves the margin you would use to grow, and signals low value. Many
businesses that describe themselves as stalled are actually profitable businesses being run at
half the price the market would tolerate.

Test: raise prices on new customers only, by a meaningful amount, for one
month. If conversion barely moves you were leaving money on the table. See
should I raise my prices.

3. Your market is smaller than you assumed

Some businesses have not stalled, they have finished. They reached most of the people who
would ever want the thing at the price offered. This is the hardest one to accept and the most
expensive to misdiagnose, because the response is not to work harder on the same motion, it is
to change the motion.

Test: estimate how many businesses or people plausibly fit your buyer
description in the geography you serve. If you have already reached a meaningful share of them,
the constraint is the market, not your execution.

4. The founder became the bottleneck

Very common and rarely named. If every deal needs you, every decision routes through you, and
your calendar is the actual capacity limit of the business, growth stopped because you ran out
of hours. The business is not broken, it is saturated at the size one person can carry.

Test: for one week, log which activities only you can do. If the list is long
and mostly not strategic, that is the constraint.

5. You have no distribution, only a product

A repeatable way to reach buyers is a separate asset from the thing you sell. Businesses that
grew through referrals often hit a ceiling exactly when the referral pool saturates, and
discover they never built a second channel. That is not a marketing budget problem, it is a
missing capability.

Test: name your channels and what share of revenue each produced last
quarter. If one channel produces nearly all of it, you have concentration risk and a ceiling.

6. Nothing is wrong and you are early

Sometimes the honest answer is that the strategy is sound and has not compounded yet. Changing
course here is the costly error, because you reset the clock on something that was working. This
is the rarest of the six, and it is worth ruling the others out before you claim it.

Why the order matters more than the list

Most owners already suspect two or three of these. The failure is not ignorance, it is that
the uncomfortable diagnosis gets skipped. Founders who suspect their market is capped will
usually test marketing channels first, because that is the answer they can act on without
grieving anything.

This is exactly the failure a board is built to catch. Not by knowing more than you, but by
having no reason to protect the answer you prefer.

Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/why-isnt-my-business-growing.html.

Written by the team behind Ralvan.

How Aaron Sorkin Writes Dialogue: The Actual Technique

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:31:00 +0000

Writers trying to imitate Sorkin usually copy the surface: overlapping speech, walking
conversations, long articulate speeches. The result reads as pastiche, because the rhythm is a
consequence rather than a technique.

What he has described consistently across interviews and his own teaching is something more
transferable.

Intention and obstacle

He has repeatedly credited his approach to a principle drawn from theatre: a scene requires a
character with an intention and an obstacle in the way. Not a topic. Not information the audience
needs. Somebody wants something and something is stopping them.

Once that structure is in place, dialogue writes itself as a series of attempts. The character
tries one approach, meets resistance, tries another. That is why the exchanges feel like combat
even when the characters are allies. They are always trying to get something.

This is the whole engine, and it works identically in quiet, sparse writing.

Argument as structure

His scenes are frequently built as arguments where both sides are genuinely defensible. That
is why they can sustain length. A scene where one person is right and the other is wrong ends as
soon as the audience works out which is which.

The transferable practice: write your opposing position at full strength.
Most writers weaken the argument they disagree with, which collapses the scene. The discipline is
making the side you oppose as persuasive as you can.

Rhythm is rewriting, not inspiration

He has spoken about reading dialogue aloud obsessively and treating it as closer to music than
to speech. The distinctive rhythm comes from a large number of passes, not from a first draft
arriving that way.

Which means the accessible part of his method is not the talent. It is the willingness to read
a scene aloud twenty times and keep cutting.

Where it does not transfer

Worth being clear about the limits. Sorkin writes characters who are unusually articulate,
which suits institutions full of people paid to argue: newsrooms, courtrooms, campaigns, boardrooms.

Applied to characters who would not speak that way, the technique produces something false.
Plenty of great screenwriting works in the opposite direction, where characters cannot say what
they mean and the drama sits in the gap. Both are valid, and the choice depends on what your
story is about.

What to take from it

Give every character in every scene something they are trying to get.
Make the obstacle another person's incompatible intention, not circumstance.
Write the opposing argument at full strength.
Read it aloud until the rhythm is deliberate.
Do not copy the articulacy unless your characters have earned it.

The first two matter most, and they are not stylistic. They are the difference between a scene
and a conversation.

Originally published at https://www.moviementors.ai/answers/aaron-sorkin-dialogue-technique.html.

Written by the team behind Movie Mentors.

How to Develop a Movie Idea Into a Screenplay

Ido Barkan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:30:41 +0000

An idea is not a story. Development is the work of turning one into the other, and skipping it
is why so many promising premises collapse in the middle of a draft.

Step 1: find the engine

Every workable premise contains something that generates events on its own. A goal with a
deadline. A secret that will be discovered. A countdown. A lie that has to be maintained.

If you cannot identify what forces your story to keep moving, that is the first thing to build.
Without an engine you will be pushing every scene uphill by hand.

Step 2: decide whose story it is

Often less obvious than it seems. The person the idea came from is not always the person the
story belongs to. The protagonist should be whoever changes most, whoever has most at stake, and
whoever makes the decisions that drive events.

If those three are different people, you have a structural problem worth resolving before you
write.

Step 3: build the opposition before the plot

Most writers develop the protagonist thoroughly and the antagonist barely, then wonder why the
middle is soft. Opposition determines the shape of the story more than the protagonist does,
because it determines what happens.

The opposition needs a goal that is incompatible with the protagonist's, a reason it cannot be
easily overcome, and ideally a position the audience can understand even while opposing it.

Step 4: find the escalation

Name the complications, each worse than the last, each caused by the previous one. Caused by
matters enormously. A sequence of unrelated bad events is not escalation, it is a list.

Three is enough to know you have a film. If you cannot reach three, the premise needs more
work before it can carry a draft.

Step 5: locate the midpoint

Something must change in the middle, or act two becomes one long stretch of the same thing.
Useful midpoints usually recontextualise: information that changes the meaning of everything
before it, a victory that creates a worse problem, or the moment the protagonist stops running.

Step 6: know the ending, at least roughly

Not the final scene, but the answer to the question your story asks. Do they get what they
want? Do they get what they need instead? Does the cost turn out to be too high?

Writing toward an unknown ending is possible and some writers work that way deliberately. For
a first script it is the most common cause of abandonment.

How long this takes

Longer than most people expect and much less time than a failed draft. Development is where
problems are cheap to fix. A structural flaw costs an afternoon at this stage and three months
once you are on page seventy.

The part that is hard alone

Development is fundamentally a conversation. It works by someone asking what happens then, and
why would he do that, and what if she already knew. The questions do the work.

Writers with access to a room or a trusted collaborator get this automatically. Writers without
it tend to develop in their own head, where every answer sounds fine, which is exactly the
condition under which weak premises survive to page sixty.

Originally published at https://www.moviementors.ai/answers/how-to-develop-a-movie-idea.html.

Written by the team behind Movie Mentors.