TLDR; Try the Northstar Worksheet to create a great elevator pitch and startup summary.

I'm fortunate to live in the heart of Silicon Valley, and to meet so many aspiring entrepreneurs. While their enthusiasm and irrational optimism (which I'm very guilty of too!) is palpable, far too many have an elevator pitch which falls flat, or after several minutes of them describing their company I still don't know what they do.

During the first dot-com boom, required reading for every new employee at a startup was Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm which provided a Positioning Worksheet. This worksheet asked key questions every founder should know, and then wrapped them into a positioning statement to ground the company. Conveniently, this statement was also a great baseline elevator pitch.

I've used the Positioning Worksheet so many times over the years when helping founders with their company, that I finally decided to create an online version that is also AI agent friendly.

What is the Northstar Worksheet?

Beside being an online version of Geoffrey Moore's positioning worksheet, the Northstar Worksheet asks additional questions that would normally be in a pitch deck. The result is a very clean summary of a startup that can be:

  • Used with ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. to continue your ideation.
  • Shared using MCP so other agents in the Agentic Web can find your startup and infer synergies.
  • Used by an agentic orchestration framework like CrewAI or LangGraph to accomplish deep research about your industry, competitors, customers, and potential partnerships.
  • Used to inform an A2A agent that represents you. This agent can be added to your Agentic Profile (DID document) on identity hosts like Matchwise to constantly surface business opportunities.

Quickstart

  1. From your browser, go to the Northstar Worksheet
  2. Fill out the interactive positioning worksheet. For each tab, you can add as many ideas as you want and toggle between the best ones. The resulting positioning statement is shown below.
  3. For the "Problem", type in the top 3-4 problems you want to solve for your customer. Use the "eye" icon to hide problems while you brainstorm. Hidden problems will not appear in the company summary (shown later).
  4. For the "Market Opportunity", highlight the top 2-3 market segments you are targeting. Simply enter the Total Available Market (TAM) for each in U.S. dollars.
  5. For the "Solution", again enter 3-4 key features of your solution that sets it above your competitors. Also notice the three-bars icon to the left of each solution - drag this to reorder your list.
  6. For "Milestones", list the ones you would want an investor to write a check to make happen. Be realistic about cost and duration - this may become a promise!
  7. For "Team" simply add the person's name, LinkedIn profile URL, and whether they are full time, or not.
  8. The "Bonus" section is where you can put links to everything else!

The Markdown Summary section provides an AI friendly description of everything you have typed (except the hidden data). Tap "Copy Markdown" and place it into your favorite AI tool.

The Share to Agentic Web will be described in another post ;)

More Advanced Features provides saving this worksheet, and exporting as JSON.

Wrapping Up

I hope you find this tool useful, and please let me know of any improvements you'd like to see!