Why the i-SCAN Method was created

With over 25 years in business and process development, I created the i-SCAN method to fill a critical gap I believe exist between the instant the founder has the idea and she/he start spending time and money with the customer validation.

My Story

I’ve spent more than 25 years working in operations and product roles — Operations Management, Product Owner, Quality, Agile methodology, and more, with certifications across most of it.
Every time something went wrong, my first question after resolving it was always “why did this happen?” followed immediately by “what we need to do, so it doesn’t happen again?”
That question almost always led to some new process, or a change to an existing one.

Most people solve the immediate problem and move forward. But few actually stop to build something that prevents the same problem from happening a second time. I’ve spent my career being one of the latter.

In parallel, during my free time on weekends and nights, I built more than 20 ventures as a solo-founder on my own time and money, trying to reach my financial independence — websites, mobile apps, online radios, physical products, one patented invention, and many more. All of them launched, and all of them failed financially.

From the beginning I started studying the topic, looking for what I was missing. I took marketing and entrepreneurship courses at the University of Miami and Broward College. I attended countless SCORE webinars. I went through Founder Institute’s accelerator program — one with its own selection process, not something you simply sign up for.

And I also read the theory itself: Lean Startup, Lean Canvas, Customer Discovery, Business Model Canvas, Steve Blank’s work, but every time, I ran into one of two problems. Either I genuinely couldn’t figure out how to apply what I learned to what I was actually building , or the advice came down to the same thing: talk to customers, build an MVP. iterate.

That advice isn’t wrong. But it assumes the idea underneath it is at least partially sound, and that you have time and money to spend. That is what I believed, so I spent the time and the money the advice called for.

Looking back now, I realize what I was actually looking for was a step before all of that theory. Every one of those methodologies assumes you already have an idea worth pursuing. What I needed was something different: a way to review the idea itself, in every sense, and find its weak points — without having to guess them from conversations with customers. That methodology didn’t exist. That’s why I built it.

I know now that most of this feels obvious to founders who’ve already succeeded. It feels obvious to me too, at this point. But when you’re just starting, excited about a new idea and only wanting to make it real, you don’t know everything you’re supposed to carefully analyze first. And nobody was teaching this as its own thing — it showed up scattered across different courses, buried inside something like ‘marketing,’ never named as its own step. So you never gave it the weight it actually deserved.

In my head there was always a reason why each of my ventures failed: each of them had its own separate cause — bad timing, wrong marketing, not better enough, not different enough, not enough funding, etc.
Each explanation felt true at the time. But none of them held up when I looked at the pattern across all twenty.

After tripping over the same stone enough times, I finally saw it: the project as a whole had a problem that talking to customers or building an MVP was never going to fix, therefore, before starting any new venture, what I actually needed was a way to check the idea before any of that — before an MVP, before a customer conversation, before spending anything.

I didn’t find what I was looking for — something approachable, something like a process, step by step, that could give me at least a theoretical sense of what the project as a whole would actually require from me to make it successful in the long run, before the step of talking to customers or building MVPs, so I don’t waste my time and money building something I will not be able to finish.

I didn’t find that process, so I built myself. The i-SCAN Method. A method to assess what the idea will demand

I think a specific combination made this possible for me: many of failed ventures, years of real study about the theory behind them, a habit of not taking anything at face value unless it actually makes sense to me, and years spent professionally building processes – where I’ve always wanted people to understand the why behind a process, not just follow it.

It starts with five questions , but just answering those questions isn’t the hard part. The hard part is knowing how to actually answer them properly, because each answer should contain specific information.
My own first mistake, every time, was answering them with what, at the time, I thought was the right way to answer them -with the first logic answer that came to my mind.

Now I understand that an incomplete answer is as bad as no answer at all.
From there, the method will uncover the risks in the idea itself and will provide you a better understanding of what the idea will require from you, what you will need to do in order to find and reach the customers, and more. No customers required to run it. No budget. No team. Just the idea, and the proper method to examine it properly before building anything.