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| Criterion | ![]() Business Strategy 5-Minuten VC-Check | ![]() Engineering Golden Path | ![]() Product Discovery Pretotyping | ![]() Product Discovery Smoke Test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | The 5-Minute VC Check clarifies opportunities and strategic options at the earliest idea stage. It compares problem quality, customer willingness to pay, alternatives, differentiation, and market potential, and captures the result as a VC-check note, go/sharpen/park decision, and risk list. | When teams need a reliable default path for frequent use, sprawl quickly emerges without any guiding logic. Golden Path bundles the preferred path so good practice becomes easy and deviation becomes deliberate. | Pretotyping clarifies whether a customer problem and solution idea create enough real demand. It separates problem, assumption, solution, and evidence, and captures the result as a pretotyping sketch, test setup, and conversion data. | When demand only needs to be roughly verified, it tests interest with minimal effort. It measures whether people would take a next step at all. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Low | Low |
Timedifferent | 5-15 min | 1-3 Tage Setup, laufend | Stunden bis wenige Tage | 1-5 Tage |
Participantsdifferent | 1-5 | 2-8 | 1-4 | Nutzertraffic |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async |
Outputdifferent | VC-check note, Go/sharpen/park decision, Risk and assumption list, Next validation step | Golden Path Guide, Templates, Quality Checks | Pretotyping sketch, Test setup, Conversion data, Go or no-go decision | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note |
Tagsno overlap | StartupValidationCompetition | EngineeringProductivityGovernance | ValidationDemandMVP | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth |



