AI-generated scene: a light bulb inside a pressure chamber.
Litmus

LITMUS · IDEA VALIDATION

Kill bad ideas in four days. Keep the capital.

Litmus is a four-day workshop that tests a product idea against customer, market and technical evidence before code is written or budget is committed. It ends in a go, no-go or iterate verdict, with the rationale recorded.

Book a 30-minute call → See Spark, the next step after a go
35%of failed startups die from no market need
95%of innovations fail to return cost of capital
~40%of innovation portfolio reclaimed when zombies are killed
4 daysto a go / no-go / iterate verdict

A Mantle framework

WITH LITMUS

A defensible verdict on the bet before the budget is committed.

  1. 1Sharpens the hypothesisSurfaces the assumptions and agrees kill criteria on day one.
  2. 2Gathers real evidenceCustomer, market and technical signal, weighted explicitly.
  3. 3Delivers the verdictGo to Spark, no-go cheaply, or iterate with re-test conditions.
Most cited

reason in startup post-mortems: no market need

Up to 80%

of features in the average software product are rarely or never used

4 days

to a go, no-go or iterate verdict

DAY 1 · HYPOTHESIS

Agree what would kill it before the evidence arrives.

  • The stated hypothesis sharpened and the implicit assumptions surfaced
  • Kill criteria agreed on day one, before evidence biases the team
  • Bets from North Star product strategy enter without translation loss
DAY 2 · CUSTOMER EVIDENCE

Real customer signal not surveys or internal opinion.

  • Structured interviews, calls, intent data and churn drivers, gathered against the hypothesis
  • Evidence from customers, not stakeholder confidence
  • Facilitators in the EU, UK, KSA, UAE and US, fluent in the customer's context
DAY 3 · MARKET AND TECHNICAL

Market, build and regulatory exposure tested in one day.

  • Market sizing (TAM, SAM, SOM) with primary sourcing
  • Competitive teardown: who else is here, what they miss, where this bet wins
  • Technical feasibility: build complexity, dependencies, integration debt, scaling unknowns
  • Regulatory exposure: what changes legally if the bet ships, and which clocks it starts
DAY 4 · VERDICT

Go, no-go or iterate with the rationale on record.

  • Customer, market and technical evidence weighted explicitly
  • Go: hypothesis, evidence and build target hand off to Spark
  • No-go: the capital reallocation path, team redirection and lessons captured
  • Iterate: specific changes and time-boxed re-test conditions
Quantified outcomes

From 95% failure to a portfolio where the bets that ship are the bets that work.

Litmus turns the innovation portfolio from a feature factory into a bet portfolio with quantified evidence, defensible kill criteria, and capital that recycles.

$109M wasted / $1B spentProject performance loss that Litmus prevents (PMI Pulse)
$29.5B unused-feature taxThe industry-wide bill for validating after launch (Pendo)
~40% capital reallocatedInnovation budget freed when zombies are killed systematically (Innosight)
95% → 60% failureRealistic improvement when bets are validated before commitment
35% → near-zeroShare of failures attributable to "no market need" after Litmus discipline
4 days to verdictVs. 6–18 months of build-then-discover
Go / no-go / iterateDefensible verdict with rationale, not opinion
Customer evidence anchoredReal signal, not internal stakeholder confidence
Portfolio compoundingReclaimed capital recycles into bets with real evidence

Validate the bet in four days, before you build it for a year.

mantlenow.com/products/litmus   Outcomes, accelerated.
Book a 30-minute call → See Spark, the next step after a go