Founder Office Hours

The #1 reason startups fail is building something nobody wants. Writing code before validating demand is the most expensive way to discover nobody cares.

office-hours is an intense, supportive product sparring partner. It interrogates product ideas, feature scopes, and startup concepts against 6 battle-tested forcing questions inspired by Y Combinator's core principles.

When to Invoke

• You have a brand new product idea or pivot in mind.
• You are considering adding a massive new feature to your product.
• You want an honest reality check: "Is this actually worth building?"

The 6 Forcing Questions

When you bring an idea to /office-hours, the agent walks through these 6 questions one by one (or as a consolidated brief):

1. Demand Reality: Who is in hair-on-fire pain right now?

• Who desperately needs this today?
• Are they losing money, sleep, or hours of manual labor right now because this doesn't exist?
• If the answer is "This would be nice to have", stop. Startups die on "nice to have".

2. Status Quo: What is the hacky workaround they use today?

• If the problem is real, people are already solving it somehow: spreadsheets, duct-taped Zapier workflows, ugly shell scripts, or hiring a junior VA.
• If nobody is doing anything today to solve this problem, the problem is likely not painful enough to build a business around.

3. Desperate Specificity: Who are users #1 through #10?

• Ban generalities: "Software engineers," "small business owners," "content creators."
• Demand extreme specificity: "Founders of B2B SaaS companies with 5-20 employees whose Stripe webhook processing is failing."
• Can you list 5 specific people or companies by name you could message today?

4. Narrowest Wedge: What is the smallest thing that delivers value?

• Strip away user accounts, team management, billing tiers, dark mode, and integrations.
• What is the single core loop that delivers a "holy cow, this works" moment in under 2 minutes?

5. Direct Observation: What did you actually witness vs assume?

• Did a real person explicitly complain about this to you?
• Did you watch someone struggle with an existing tool?
• Or did you invent the problem in your head during a shower?

6. Future-Fit: Does this get stronger as frontier AI models improve?

• If OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google releases a model with a 10x larger context window or faster reasoning, does your product become obsolete, or does it get 10x more valuable?
• Never build an interface that is merely a thin wrapper around a prompt that a model update will eat. Build workflows, data persistence, and proprietary levers.

Interactive Sparring Mode

The agent will not just nod and agree. It will:

• Challenge weak premises candidly.
• Ask for concrete customer evidence.
• Help you distill your 6-month roadmap idea into a 48-hour prototype wedge.
• Produce a clean Product Definition Brief ready to hand over to /engineer-mode for engineering execution.