Reserve
Reserve takes a refundable deposit on an Offer before its Product exists, the first test every Startup runs and the evidence that opens Building.
Reserve takes a refundable deposit on an Offer before its Product exists. It is the first test a Startup runs, because money shows who switches and compliments do not.
Why money first
Evidence comes in three grades. Behavior is what people did, commitment is what they gave up, and opinion is what they said. Opinion weighs zero: a hundred people who call an idea great have bought nothing.
A deposit is commitment-grade Evidence on the Startup's Problem. It costs the buyer something real, so it separates the people who want the Product from the people being polite. A Startup enters Building only on commitment-grade Evidence from outside buyers, and deposits are the fastest source of it.
When building is cheap, the one way left to fail is to build something nobody wants. Reserve puts that question first, before the first Change ships.
The reserve page
The reserve page is compiled from the founding Hypothesis on the day the Startup is created. The headline states the Problem in the buyer's words. The Offer states the Price, anchored against what the buyer pays today, and the date it ships.
Take termcheck.app, an Agent that reviews client contracts for freelance designers. Its reserve page tells designers to stop signing contracts that let clients skip the last payment. The Offer is $29 a month, against the $300 a lawyer charges per review, with a $29 deposit that becomes the first month.
Each line of the page records the slot it came from, so a pivot that changes the Problem rewrites the headline. Every change to the page can run as an Experiment, and the winning version becomes the definition.
Terms that keep a deposit honest
Reserving is accepting an Offer on reserve terms. The accept Verb records the reserver as a Customer and places an Order that ships later. The deposit is that Order's first payment, collected through Stripe.
| Term | Rule |
|---|---|
| Refund on request | in full, at any time before the ship date |
| Refund on a miss | automatic, to every reserver, if the Startup does not ship by the date |
| Conversion | at ship, the deposit pays the first Invoice or the first Order |
| Disclosure | the page says the Product is not built and names the ship date |
The deposit is optional. A reserve without one is a Waitlist entry, which grades as opinion and never opens Building.
Reading the result
The Startup fixes its threshold before the page goes live: the number of deposits, from how many people reached, by what date. That threshold is its minimum success criteria for the week, and nobody moves it after the first visitor arrives.
Only outside buyers count. A deposit from anyone tied to the Startup's owners, or to another Startup in its Portfolio, is recorded and excluded from the threshold.
A miss is a result, not a failure. Every reserver is refunded, and the Decision records what was learned. The Idea can return with a new approach or a different ICP, often as two sibling Startups racing on their own reserve pages.
Where reservers come from
A reserve page needs people in front of it, and the seed Plays supply them. Cold outbound to a researched list of the ICP works for b2b Offers. Community threads where the Problem is already discussed work for most others.
A Startup built for a creator's audience runs a Reserve drop: one post, a 72-hour window, and Building opens only if deposits cross the threshold. A Startup with no audience runs a $100 ad probe and treats it as exploration, not growth.
A b2b example: claimdesk.ai files dental insurance claims for small practices. It emails 400 practice managers who posted about claim denials and asks for a refundable first month, $199. Fourteen reserve within ten days, against a threshold of ten.
After the deposit
At the ship date, each Order converts and the deposit pays the first Invoice. Reservers are the Startup's first Customers. They get access first and are asked for an Interview in their first week, which turns early usage into behavior-grade Evidence.
Converted deposits count as outside revenue. Every reserve, refund, and conversion is kept forever, so the next Startup aimed at the same Problem starts from what this one learned.
Next
- Demand: the seed and compounding Plays that follow.
- Offers and pricing: the Offer the deposit converts into.