Guide · Layer 1

Scope It

Written for: seed / Series A scientist-founder

Know what you’re building this for

Even before you start drawing boxes & arrows, answer two questions: why are you building a TEA, and what question are you trying to answer? The why usually looks like one of these:

Getting a baseline: where do the economics roughly sit?
Communication & convincing: you’re making a case to an investor or a customer, and showing your work through a model & the slides that come off it
Test an R&D hypothesis: should you focus on experiment / milestone A or B? Use a TEA to estimate the relative impact of these decisions!

For the bigger picture of what a TEA is for, start at What a TEA is.

🧭 Coach’s Read

We often see teams needing TEA help because an investor’s asking them to show their work — we consider this the tail wagging the dog! Our first question in any coaching session is some version of: what hypothesis are you testing?

How does your tech plug into the real world?

To make a sellable product or service, it has to slot into a real supply chain or process flow, and interact with other humans!

What’s the core technology? Try saying it in one sentence: what goes in, what transformation happens, what comes out
What does this process look like in the real world today — or if it doesn’t exist yet, what would it look like? You’re rarely the first to make this product or something close to it. How would you know? Find comps, do the reading, and talk to people who run something similar — real flowsheets are out there (start with the PFD/BFD library). Then put your best guess on paper and validate it later when you go get feedback
What would you have to account for to stitch your tech in? Is it a direct replacement for one existing step? Or does it change several things at once — feedstock, conditions, downstream purification?

🧭 Coach’s Read

The founders we coach usually know their chemistry cold and the surrounding process barely at all — super common! Often, most of the cost sits in that surrounding process, so it’s critical to map it out & understand the chemistry in that context.

Next: 1.2 — Draw the process →