Is the personal plan generated by a language model?

No. The plan is produced by fixed rules over your eight answers. No model call is involved in choosing your route, your sessions or your exercises, which is why the rules can be published and checked. A copilot helps you inside each session, but it does not decide what the plan is.

How many interviews does the practicum ask for?

10 to 15 conversations per segment, stopping when new interviews stop changing the answers. The completion criterion for that session is at least 10 logged interviews, or a priced concept test where direct conversations are genuinely impossible.

Can the practicum be finished in five days?

Five working sessions can. The market cannot: interviews take days to schedule and replies to a launched test arrive over the following days. The plan makes that pause explicit instead of hiding it inside a promise of five days.

What counts as evidence?

Three levels, weakest to strongest: opinions, observed behaviour, and commitments such as a booked call, an agreed pilot, a letter of intent or a prepayment. The practicum is built to move you up that scale rather than to collect encouragement.

Is this a coached accelerator?

No. It is a self-paced interactive practicum. If continuous live mentor feedback is essential for you, the assessment says so before you pay rather than after.

The method, in full

How your five-session plan is actually built

Most personalised programmes cannot show you their rules, because there are none: a model writes something plausible for every visitor. This one is different, and the difference is checkable. Your plan is produced by fixed rules over your eight answers. No model call decides your route, your sessions or your exercises.

That makes the whole method publishable, so here it is: the sources it stands on, exactly what each answer moves, both syllabi with their completion criteria, the evidence standards, and the things this format cannot do for you.

Where it comes from

Six sources, and what is taken from each

Nothing here is a new framework. The practicum sequences established ones and holds you to their standards of proof.

Source	What the practicum takes from it
Customer Development Steve Blank	Problem interviews before the solution is specified; leaving the building is a stage of the programme, not an afterthought.
The Lean Startup Eric Ries	Validated learning before scope; build-measure-learn; an explicit pivot-or-persevere decision at the end.
The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick	Ask about past behaviour, not the idea. Compliments are not evidence; commitment and advancement are.
Disciplined Entrepreneurship Bill Aulet	One beachhead segment chosen and qualified before anything is specified for it.
Testing Business Ideas David Bland and Alexander Osterwalder	Evidence strength as a scale; Test Cards and Learning Cards; thresholds written before the test runs.
Jobs to Be Done Clayton Christensen and others	Switching triggers, current alternatives, cost of inaction and the anxieties that block a purchase.

The rules, published

What each of your answers moves

The assessment asks eight questions. Every one of them changes something in the plan you are shown. Where an answer adds work, the plan labels that line, so you can tell your plan from the default one.

Product stage: Selects the route: an idea or a mockup goes to Idea Validation, a working or manually delivered product goes to Prototype-to-Customer.
Existing evidence: Corrects the route where the stage alone would mislead. Thin evidence adds an evidence-literacy strand and, on the prototype route, inserts problem conversations before the offer is designed. Existing commitments remove the literacy work and replace it with interpreting what you already hold.
The question you most need answered: Chooses which session goes deeper and adds a concrete extra exercise to that session. The plan marks these lines, so you can see what your answers added.
What usually blocks you: Named in the session where it actually bites, so the reason a session is in your plan refers to your answer rather than to a generic founder.
Your next expensive commitment: Frames what the plan has to be ready for: a build sprint, a contractor estimate, an ad budget or an investor conversation.
Preferred kind of help: Wanting a live mentor produces a warning rather than a sale: this is a self-paced practicum, not a coached accelerator.
Available time: Sets the recommended pace and, where you chose the tightest one, states plainly that the market adds days of its own.
Readiness to face the market: Changes the market-facing session: a direct test, a prepared lower-friction first step, an indirect test where the assumption allows it, or a warning that private work cannot produce market evidence.

Why the route can be corrected. Product stage alone is a poor description of risk. A founder with a working product and no evidence has an unproven problem, not a distribution problem; a founder still at idea stage holding prepayments does not need to be taught what proof is. The rules above treat evidence as a second dimension, so the plan names the risk you actually have.

The syllabus

Both routes, with the criterion that closes each session

A session is not finished when you have read it. It is finished when its criterion is met, and the criteria are written to be checkable by you, not by us.

Idea Validation Practicum

From Idea to an Evidence-Backed Product Direction

Chosen when

You have an idea, a concept or a mockup, and nothing a customer can use yet.

Primary result

Behavioural problem evidence, one selected segment, a tested value proposition and a build-ready PRD.

Session 1: Frame the problem bet
Produces: A problem statement and a ranked assumption map.
Done when: You can name the one assumption that, if wrong, makes the rest irrelevant.
Session 2: Choose the first segment
Produces: One selected segment and a prospect qualification profile.
Done when: You can identify 20 reachable prospects who match the profile; 20 contacts typically yield 6-10 real conversations.
Session 3: Run the problem interviews
Produces: A completed interview round and an evidence log.
Done when: You have run at least 10 interviews, or a priced concept test where direct conversations are impossible, and each result is logged.
Fieldwork windowThe programme pauses here while the market answers.
Session 4: Read the evidence
Produces: An evidence summary and an updated assumption map.
Done when: You can name which assumptions survived contact with real prospects, and which did not.
Session 5: Define the smallest product and decide
Produces: A tested value proposition, a build-ready PRD and a documented decision.
Done when: A contractor or AI tool could estimate and start from your PRD without a call, and the decision is written down.

Prototype-to-Customer Practicum

From Working Prototype to a Testable First-Customer Path

Chosen when

Something already works, even if you run parts of it by hand, or you have first users and early conversations.

Primary result

A selected first segment, testable offer, launched demand test and clear next iteration.

Session 1: Choose the first buyer
Produces: One selected segment and a prospect qualification profile.
Done when: You can identify 20 reachable prospects who match the profile; 20 contacts typically yield 6-10 real conversations.
Session 2: Find the reason to act
Produces: A demand assessment: trigger, current workaround, cost of inaction and reasons not to buy.
Done when: You can explain why this customer would act now, or why the assumption remains weak.
Session 3: Turn the product into an offer
Produces: A testable offer and message a qualified prospect can answer.
Done when: The prospect can understand who it is for, what changes and what to do next.
Session 4: Design the market test
Produces: A ready-to-launch market experiment and interpretation rule.
Done when: You know exactly what action to run and what result would change the next decision.
Session 5: Launch, read and decide
Produces: A live market test, evidence summary and documented next move.
Done when: The offer has been exposed to real potential customers and the next experiment is defined.
Fieldwork windowThe programme pauses here while the market answers.

Standards of proof

What the practicum will accept as evidence

Three levels, in order of strength. Opinions are what people say about your idea and are the easiest thing to collect. Behaviour is what they already do: workarounds, tools they pay for, time they spend. Commitment is what they give up to move forward, and it comes as a ladder: a reply, a booked call, an agreed pilot, a letter of intent, a prepayment.

Sample sizes are named, not implied. 10 to 15 conversations per segment, stopping when new interviews stop changing the answers. Twenty qualified contacts typically yield 6 to 10 real conversations, which is why the segment session ends at twenty reachable prospects.

Thresholds are set before the test runs. A demand test defines its positive, negative and insufficient results in advance. Deciding afterwards what a result meant is how a weak test and weak demand end up looking identical.

Price is part of the test where it can be. A concept test with a price attached produces stronger evidence than one without, because it asks for a decision rather than an opinion.

Limits

What this format cannot do

It is self-paced. There is no live mentor reviewing your decisions, and the assessment tells you so before you pay if that is what you asked for.
It cannot produce market evidence while you work privately. Preparation is possible; a result is not, until an assumption is exposed to real potential customers.
It does not run your research, outreach or sales for you. The interviews and the test are yours to run, which is the only reason the evidence is yours to trust.
It guarantees a readable result, not a positive one. Ending with a documented decision to revise or to gather more evidence is a successful practicum, not a failed one.

See what these rules produce for your project

The assessment takes a few minutes and shows your full plan before anything is paid for.

Take the assessment