The 8 BuildGuide stages

The eight stages in order

1. 1

   Discover Idea

   AI proposes 3 directions based on your skills, giving you concrete starting points instead of a blank page.

2. 2

   Market Research

   Size your market and validate urgency, so you know the opportunity is real and worth pursuing now.

3. 3

   Competitor Analysis

   Map the landscape and identify gaps the existing players leave open.

4. 4

   Audience Research

   Define your ICP and validate it with interviews so you are building for a real, specific customer.

5. 5

   Product Requirements

   Create a PRD scoped to 4 weeks or less, keeping the first build tight and shippable.

6. 6

   Validation Plan

   Generate pre-build demand signals so you have evidence before you write code.

7. 7

   Build Plan

   Lay out a week-by-week delivery roadmap for the build.

8. 8

   Marketing Strategy

   Produce a GTM strategy and launch assets so you are ready to reach customers.

Stages 1 and 2: Discover Idea and Market Research

Stage 1, Discover Idea, replaces the blank page. Rather than asking you to conjure a concept from nothing, the AI proposes three directions based on your skills, so you start from concrete, buildable options grounded in what you can actually execute. The AI research tools do the generative work here, turning your background into candidate ideas you can react to. The deliverable is a short set of three idea directions. The quality gate is simple but real: you leave the stage with directions tied to your own skills rather than a vague wish, so nothing downstream is built on a concept you cannot deliver.

Stage 2, Market Research, pressure-tests whichever direction you carry forward. The work is to size the market and validate urgency, answering two questions at once: is the opportunity large enough to matter, and is it pressing enough to pursue now rather than someday. The AI research tools gather the market signals so you are weighing evidence instead of intuition. The deliverable is a sized, time-sensitive opportunity. The gate: you do not advance until the market looks real and the urgency is genuine, because a large but sleepy market is as risky as a tiny one.

Stages 3 and 4: Competitor Analysis and Audience Research

Stage 3, Competitor Analysis, maps the landscape you would be entering and identifies the gaps existing players leave open. The point is not to admire the incumbents but to find the seam they are not serving, since that seam is usually where a new product has room to win. The AI research tools assemble the competitive picture so you can see who is present and where they fall short. The deliverable is a mapped landscape with a clearly named gap. The gate: you carry forward a specific opening, not a general sense that the space is crowded or empty.

Stage 4, Audience Research, narrows the opportunity from a market to a person. Here you define your ideal customer profile and validate it with interviews, so you are building for a real, specific customer rather than an abstraction. The AI research tools help you shape and sharpen the ICP, but the interviews are what confirm it, because a profile only earns trust once real people recognize themselves in it. The deliverable is a validated ICP. The gate: the customer is specific and confirmed by conversation, not assumed.

Stages 5 and 6: Product Requirements and Validation Plan

Stage 5, Product Requirements, turns everything you have learned into a plan you can build. You create a product requirements document scoped to four weeks or less, which forces the first build to stay tight and shippable instead of sprawling into a wish list. The AI research tools help you draft and scope the PRD against the evidence from the earlier stages. The deliverable is a four-week PRD. The gate: the scope genuinely fits four weeks, so the first release is small enough to actually reach customers.

Stage 6, Validation Plan, checks demand before you write code. The work is to generate pre-build demand signals, gathering evidence that people want the thing while it is still cheap to change course. The AI research tools help you design the demand checks and read what comes back. The deliverable is a set of pre-build demand signals. The gate: you have evidence of demand in hand before the build begins, because the cheapest time to learn a product is not wanted is before it exists.

Stages 7 and 8: Build Plan and Marketing Strategy

Stage 7, Build Plan, converts the scoped PRD into a delivery schedule. You lay out a week-by-week roadmap for the build, so the four weeks of scope become an ordered plan rather than an open-ended push. The AI research tools help you sequence the work into a realistic weekly cadence. The deliverable is a week-by-week delivery roadmap. The gate: the plan is concrete and time-boxed, so you know what ships in each week rather than hoping it all comes together at the end.

Stage 8, Marketing Strategy, gets you ready to reach customers. You produce a go-to-market strategy along with launch assets, so shipping the product and putting it in front of the audience you defined in stage 4 happen together rather than as an afterthought. The AI research tools help generate the GTM plan and the launch assets. The deliverable is a GTM strategy with launch assets. The gate: you finish the flow ready to launch to a known audience, not with a finished product and no plan to get it seen.

How the stages connect

The order matters. Market Research and Competitor Analysis tell you the opportunity is real and where the gap is; Audience Research narrows it to a person; the PRD scopes it to four weeks; the Validation Plan checks demand before you build; and the Build Plan and Marketing Strategy get you shipped and in front of customers.

Reading the flow as a chain of artifacts makes the logic clear. Discover Idea hands you three directions; Market Research hands you a sized, time-sensitive opportunity; Competitor Analysis hands you the gap; Audience Research hands you a validated ICP; Product Requirements hands you a four-week PRD; the Validation Plan hands you pre-build demand signals; the Build Plan hands you a week-by-week roadmap; and Marketing Strategy hands you a GTM plan with launch assets. Each deliverable is the input to the next stage, so a weak artifact anywhere in the chain weakens everything after it.

• Stages 1-4 produce the evidence: idea directions, market, gap, and customer.
• Stages 5-6 turn evidence into a scoped plan and a demand check.
• Stages 7-8 turn the plan into a delivery roadmap and a launch.

Working through the flow

Treat the sequence as a discipline rather than a suggestion. Because each stage feeds the next, skipping ahead means building later work on a shaky deliverable. The AI research tools at each stage exist to make clearing the gate faster, not to let you bypass it. When a stage surfaces a problem, that is the flow doing its job - better to catch it now than after the build. See BuildGuide overview for how gates and deliverables work.