# Dream desk

Decide what to build, and whether to build it, before any code exists.

Canonical URL: https://worldenterprise.org/insights/topic/dream/
Last updated: 2026-10-10
Publisher: World Enterprise, run by World Enterprise Group Incorporated

Dream is the survey stage: the work you do before a team is hired and before a line of code is written. The mistakes made here are the most expensive ones, because they are invisible. A founder who skips the problem brief, trusts friendly interview answers or sizes a market from a top-down report can spend a year building something nobody asked for and never see the warning.

The articles on this desk are practical and ordered. Ask whether the idea is a business or only a feature. Map the alternatives your customer already uses. Interview customers without collecting false encouragement, and test honestly. Size the market from the bottom up. Decide in advance what would make you stop. Then write the problem brief, so that everything built afterwards can be checked against it. Each piece names its public sources and says what it cannot tell you.

## Articles

- [Fake-door and concierge tests](https://worldenterprise.org/insights/fake-door-and-concierge-tests/): Two ways to learn whether people will act before you build: a page for a feature that does not exist, and a service you deliver by hand. With an honesty note.
- [Kill criteria: deciding in advance when to stop](https://worldenterprise.org/insights/kill-criteria-deciding-in-advance-when-to-stop/): How to write down, before you start, the evidence that would make you stop, change direction or continue, and why that decision belongs to your calmer self.
- [Mapping the alternatives a customer already uses](https://worldenterprise.org/insights/mapping-the-alternatives-a-customer-already-uses/): A method for listing everything a customer does today instead of buying your product, from spreadsheets to doing nothing, and reading the gaps honestly.
- [Bottom-up market sizing for a first SaaS](https://worldenterprise.org/insights/bottom-up-market-sizing-for-a-first-saas/): Size a market from countable customers and a defensible price, using public business counts and explicit assumptions instead of a borrowed top-down figure.
- [Customer discovery interviews without false positives](https://worldenterprise.org/insights/customer-discovery-interviews-without-false-positives/): Run customer interviews that surface real behavior and commitment instead of polite encouragement, with a question set and a way to log what you hear.
- [Is your SaaS idea a business or a feature?](https://worldenterprise.org/insights/is-your-saas-idea-a-business-or-a-feature/): Six tests to run before you build, to find out whether your idea can stand alone as a company or only works as a capability inside someone else's product.
- [Write the problem brief before the code](https://worldenterprise.org/insights/write-the-problem-brief-before-the-code/): A one-page problem brief makes a team agree on who has the problem, what it costs and what done looks like before design or engineering begins.