Prometheus

What The Tool Does

Prometheus supports the central operational decision of early-stage companies: given limited time and money, what should we test next. Startups fail for many reasons, but a common one is the misallocation of scarce attention — building features no one wants because they are easy to build, running experiments that answer questions no one needs answered, pursuing customers who will never pay enough to sustain the business.

How The Tool Thinks

The framework Prometheus applies is descended from the lean-startup and customer-development tradition (Blank, Ries, Maurya) but is less prescriptive about tools and more rigorous about causal logic. The central questions are: what is the most dangerous unvalidated assumption in the business model right now; what is the cheapest experiment that would genuinely invalidate it; what would we do differently if the experiment failed; and are we willing to act on that answer.

Most startup experiments are security blankets rather than tests. They are designed so that the outcome confirms what the founder already believes. Prometheus is configured to identify those and redirect toward experiments that could actually kill the current plan.

What It Can And Cannot Do

Prometheus can structure experiment design and identify assumptions that are not being tested. It cannot evaluate the specific technical feasibility of a proposed experiment, nor judge whether the founder will actually act on the results. It also cannot replace the intuition built by repeated customer contact — the feel for what a market wants that only comes from spending time with it. The tool is most useful for founders who are already in the market but are losing themselves in second-order questions.