Context 🛠️#

Once you understand why Excel and top-down sizing fail, the next step is to stress-test your idea quickly. The course uses “Steve” as an example, but here we apply the same logic to DBB.

Rapid Viability Testing uses three steps: goal sizing, customer sizing, and market sizing. The goal is to check if my assumptions can realistically meet my minimum success criteria.

Step 1 — Goal Sizing#

The Minimum Success Criteria (MSC) defines the smallest viable outcome for my idea.

For DBB:

• Level 1: $100k ARR — manageable for a solo developer
• Level 2: $1M ARR — may require limited outsourcing

Since I’m aiming for a small, independent project, Level 1 is realistic, but Level 2 could be aspirational if adoption is strong.

Step 2 — Customer Sizing#

Next, calculate average revenue per account (ARPA):

• Pricing: $1,000/month
• Subscription type: monthly
• ARPA: $12,000/year

For DBB, my target customer is Deer (10k ARPA). Other archetypes provide context:

• Fly: $10
• Mouse: $100
• Rabbit: $1,000
• Deer: $10,000
• Elephant: $100,000
• Whale: $1,000,000

This lets me anchor my revenue model to realistic customer expectations.

Step 3 — Market Sizing#

Finally, estimate the number of customers needed to reach MSC:

• $100k ARR → 10 Deer customers
• $1M ARR → 100 Deer customers

My beachhead market should be 30–100x the number of customers to account for typical adoption and conversion rates. For DBB, that means identifying cities or municipal departments most likely to adopt digital agenda publishing first.

Steve’s example in the course shows how misaligned assumptions can break a model. For DBB, these calculations highlight a manageable customer base that fits your solo-developer constraints.