Part V · Chapter 13 · Predators · lesson 6
The ten questions
14 min
Builds on They all make the same four moves
Part V · Chapter 13 · Predators · lesson 6
14 min
Builds on They all make the same four moves
Six lessons of description are worth one reusable tool. This is the tool.
Ten questions, asked of anything that presents a way of making money. They work on a pitch, on a course, on a friend's plan, and on your own reasoning, which is the use most people skip.
The output is never a verdict. Nothing here tells you that something is a fraud, and a set of questions that produced verdicts would be worse than useless — it would be a machine for feeling certain.
What you end up with is a map of what you were not told. Some of the blanks will be innocent, some will be unknowable, and some will be blanks because filling them in would end the conversation. Knowing which are which is occasionally possible. Knowing that they are blank is always possible, and it is the part that changes decisions.
1. What was the starting capital? Not what they started the business with — what they had behind them. A year of expenses in reserve, a house to borrow against, a family that could absorb a failure. It changes what the same decisions mean.
2. Over what timeframe? Nineteen years and three years are different claims. Compressing the timeframe is the single most common distortion in these stories, and it usually happens by leaving out the earlier attempts.
3. What risk was taken? Specifically: what was the worst realistic case, and what would it have done to them. A strategy is not described until its bad case is described.
4. How many attempts failed? Theirs, and everyone else's. This is the denominator question from the survivorship lesson, and the answer is usually "nobody has counted", which is itself an answer.
5. How much of it was luck? Not as an insult. As a description: which parts of the outcome depended on something they did not control — a buyer, a market, a date, a person who happened to be there.
6. Do they make money from the strategy, or from selling the strategy? The revenue line. If the audience is the business, everything else is downstream of that.
7. Does it scale, and what happens when it does? Most edges have a capacity. If this one does, teaching it consumes it. If it genuinely does not, ask why the return is not already competed away.
8. What does survivorship hide here? Where would the people who did this and failed be recorded, and has anyone looked. If there is no register of the failures, the visible record is a filtered sample by construction.
9. What evidence exists, and who produced it? Audited by whom, verifiable by whom, and how much of it is a document the seller made. A screenshot, a testimonial and an unbroken payment record are all produced equally by the real and the unreal version.
10. What would falsify it? The most useful and the least asked. If nothing they could observe would change their view, they are not describing a claim about the world, and neither are you if you cannot answer it about your own position.
Read this once at normal speed, the way you would actually encounter it.
A mentorship programme in property. The founder started with a 12,000 deposit at twenty-six and now controls forty-one rental units across two regions. He shows the numbers on a screen: rent collected last month, the mortgage balances, the net figure. The programme is 4,800 for twelve months and includes a weekly group call, a document pack, and two site visits.
He is open about the hard parts. Tenants who do not pay. A refurbishment that ran 60% over. A period in year three when he could not make a payment and had to borrow from his brother. He says most people who join will not do anything with it, and that this is the honest truth about mentorship.
There are eleven places left this intake and the next one is in eight months. Three past students speak on the call; one of them now has nine units. The founder is not pushy and says explicitly that you should not join if the fee would be a strain.
Nothing in that is a lie. Several parts of it are unusually honest, including the two that most people would remember as the honest parts.
Predict
What would you do
Run all ten against the pitch and mark each one answered, partly answered, or not raised.
Answered: the timeframe, roughly — twenty-six to now, though the number of years is never stated plainly. Partly: the risk, through two anecdotes chosen by him. Partly: the evidence, in the form of a screen he controls. Partly: the revenue line, visible but unquantified.
Not raised at all: the starting capital behind the 12,000. The number of students and what became of them. Where the failures would be recorded. What happens when many people run the strategy in the same two regions. What would falsify it.
Five of ten never came up. Two more were answered by the seller with material the seller produced. That is the map, and the map is the output.
Check
The uncomfortable application is to a plan you already have.
What was your starting capital, including the parts that do not feel like capital. Over what timeframe are you actually expecting this. What is the worst realistic case and what would it do to you. How many people you know of have tried it and where are they now. Which parts of your expected outcome depend on things you do not control. What evidence do you have that is not a document you produced. And what would make you stop.
The last one is the test. A plan with no falsifier is a preference, and there is nothing wrong with having preferences as long as they are labelled.