Instructions
A pre-mortem is a simple technique: instead of asking 'will this work?', you imagine it's already failed and ask 'what went wrong?'. It sounds morbid. It's actually one of the most useful things you can do before committing real time and money to an idea.
The value of doing this now — before you've built anything, before you've told many people, before you've got attached — is that the cost of finding problems is almost zero. You're just thinking. Later, after months of work and some public launch, the cost of finding the same problems is much higher.
The goal isn't to scare yourself out of pursuing the idea. It's to find the weak points while they're cheap to fix, and to distinguish the risks that are genuinely fatal from the ones that are manageable. Most ideas have both.
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