Startup Due Diligence Template for Pre-Seed Founders

Due diligence at the pre-seed stage is not an audit. It's a structured investigation of whether the assumptions behind an idea are defensible. Investors run this process on every company they consider. Founders who run it on themselves arrive at pitch meetings with fewer surprises.

How to Use This Template

Work through each section and write down your current best answer. For areas where you don't have an answer, that is the research gap. For areas where your answer relies entirely on assumptions, those are the riskiest parts of the business. The goal is not perfect answers — it's an honest map of where the evidence is strong and where it isn't.

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1. Market

What to assess: The size of the addressable market, evidence that the market exists, how it's growing, and whether it's accessible from a standing start.

• What is the bottom-up market size? (Number of target buyers × annual price.)
• How is the market currently structured — fragmented, dominated by one or two players, or nascent?
• What is the primary growth driver — demographic shift, regulatory change, technology unlock, or behavioral change?
• What part of the market can you realistically reach in the first 18 months?

Red flags: Top-down TAM percentages without a bottom-up check. Markets that are "large but underserved" without a specific acquisition path. Growth assumptions that depend on the market shifting toward the product rather than the product meeting the market where it is.

2. Customer

What to assess: Who specifically has this problem, how they experience it, what they're doing about it now, and whether they would change.

• What is the job title, industry, and company size of the specific first customer?
• What are they using today to solve this problem — and what do they dislike about it?
• What would make them switch? What is the switching cost?
• Is this problem in their top three priorities, or is it something they tolerate?

Red flags: Customer descriptions that are demographic (age range, industry) rather than behavioral (specific job, specific workflow, specific pain). Lack of direct customer conversation evidence — "we assume" instead of "we spoke to."

3. Product

What to assess: What the product actually does, whether it solves the identified customer problem, and what technical or design risk exists in building it.

• What does v1 do, in one sentence, that a customer would use to describe it to a colleague?
• What is the core mechanism — the thing that makes the product work — and has it been proven technically?
• What is the minimum set of features needed to prove the core value proposition?
• What existing tools does the product need to integrate with to be usable in the target customer's workflow?

Red flags: Products that require extensive onboarding before delivering value. "Platform" thinking at stage zero — building an ecosystem before proving one use case. Technical dependencies that haven't been validated.

4. Business Model

What to assess: How the company makes money, whether the pricing aligns with the value delivered, and whether the unit economics are structurally sound.

• What is the pricing model — per seat, usage, transaction, or annual contract?
• What is the rationale for the price point — cost-plus, competitive parity, or value-based?
• What are the primary costs — people, infrastructure, acquisition, or support?
• At what revenue level does the business become contribution margin positive?

Red flags: Pricing copied from incumbents without a value justification. Unit economics that depend on very high volume before becoming viable. Acquisition cost assumptions that have no channel evidence behind them.

5. Competition

What to assess: Who the direct and indirect competitors are, what they do well, where they fall short, and what the competitive dynamics look like in 12 months.

• Who are the top three direct competitors and what is their primary differentiation?
• What do customers who switch away from incumbents say about why they left?
• What would a well-resourced competitor need to do to neutralize the core product advantage?
• Is there a structural moat — data, network, switching cost, regulatory, or integration depth?

Red flags: Competitive landscape slide that shows incumbents as inferior on every dimension. Moat described as "execution speed" or "team." No plan for what happens when a well-funded competitor copies the primary feature.

6. Team

What to assess: Why this specific team can build and distribute this specific product, and what the critical gaps are.

• What domain expertise does the team have that is directly relevant to the customer problem?
• What distribution or network advantage does the team have in the target market?
• What is the most important missing capability, and what is the plan to address it?
• Has the founding team worked together under pressure before?

Red flags: Teams with strong technical capability but no customer access in the target market. Founding teams where no one has sold to the target customer before. "We'll hire for this" without a specific plan.

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Running This Framework Faster

Working through this template manually takes time — and it's hard to know when your own answers are good enough versus self-serving. Founder Review runs the same framework as a 12-agent AI investment committee: you answer four focused questions, and the committee evaluates your answers against each due diligence dimension in parallel.

The output is a scored report with agent-level reasoning, a committee memo, and a final verdict. Each section shows the score, why it was given, and what evidence would raise it.