LAS VEGAS, Nev. – October 17, 2026 – Every new business begins with assumptions. Founders make educated guesses about who will buy, what customers will pay, which features matter, how demand will develop, and what the business will need to support that demand.
Darryl Kauffman believes the problem is not making those assumptions. It is forgetting that they are assumptions.
Kauffman, an accountant, business consultant, entrepreneur, and business coach, has spent decades working across public accounting, corporate finance, operations, and small business. Now studying New Venture Management and Quantitative Finance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he is continuing to examine how early business decisions shape what happens as a company develops.
“A new venture has to make assumptions because you don’t have all the information yet,” Kauffman said. “What I think is important is knowing which parts of your plan are based on something you have actually observed and which parts are still your best guess.”
Not Every Assumption Carries the Same Risk
A founder may assume customers want a certain feature, that a particular price will work, or that demand will justify hiring several employees. Another entrepreneur might believe customers will prefer a subscription model when they actually want to make occasional purchases.
Those assumptions have different consequences.
Kauffman says founders should pay particular attention to assumptions that would be expensive or difficult to reverse. Signing a long lease, hiring a large team, buying significant inventory, or investing heavily in systems can create commitments before the business has enough evidence to know whether the underlying idea works as expected.
“If I’m wrong about the wording on a website, I can change it this afternoon,” Kauffman said. “If I’m wrong about how many employees I need and I’ve already built the operation around that assumption, it is a much bigger decision to unwind. I would spend more time testing the assumption that creates the larger commitment.”
That does not mean a new company should wait until every question has been answered. Kauffman argues that certainty is rarely available to an entrepreneur, particularly when a business is still searching for its first customers.
The goal is to learn enough to make the next decision more intelligently.
Early Customers Can Challenge the Original Business Plan
Customer behavior is one of the clearest ways to test an early idea.
A founder may expect customers to choose a product because of price, only to discover that convenience matters more. Customers may be interested in a service but unwilling to buy it as often as expected. A feature the founder considered essential may barely come up in conversations, while customers repeatedly ask about something that received little attention in the original plan.
Kauffman believes founders should pay attention when actual behavior conflicts with the business plan.
“You can spend months deciding why you think somebody will buy,” Kauffman said. “Then you start talking to customers and find out they care about something completely different. I would rather learn that when I still have room to change than after I have spent a lot of money building around the original idea.”
At the same time, he cautions against rebuilding a company around every piece of feedback. One customer’s preference is not necessarily evidence of a larger market.
Instead, founders can look for repeated patterns. If the same concern appears in sales conversations, lost deals, customer questions, or purchasing behavior, it may deserve closer examination.
Pricing Is an Assumption Too
Kauffman says pricing deserves the same scrutiny.
A price can look reasonable in a spreadsheet while producing a different response in the market. Customers may accept the price but require more service than expected. A lower price may attract demand but leave too little room to support the customer properly. A higher price may work if the company is solving a more important problem than the founder initially understood.
His accounting and financial background has made Kauffman comfortable working with models, but he emphasizes that a model is only as useful as the assumptions behind it.
“A spreadsheet can tell you exactly what happens if you sell 500 units at a certain price,” Kauffman said. “It cannot tell you whether 500 people actually want to buy them. That part has to come from somewhere outside the spreadsheet.”
Testing can take relatively simple forms. Founders can speak directly with prospective customers, run a smaller pilot, compare responses to different offers, begin in a limited market, or track why interested prospects ultimately decide not to purchase.
The appropriate test depends on the business, but the purpose remains the same: replace important assumptions with useful evidence before making larger commitments.
Building for the Business You Actually Have
Kauffman believes another common risk is building infrastructure for the company a founder hopes to have rather than the company that currently exists.
New businesses can be tempted to purchase sophisticated software, create complicated reporting systems, establish multiple management layers, or design processes for volumes they have not yet reached.
Some preparation for growth is sensible. Building too far ahead of demand, however, can consume money and management attention that could be used to understand customers and improve the basic offer.
“There is a difference between being prepared to grow and paying today for a business you might have three years from now,” Kauffman said. “Early on, I would want to know what we actually need to serve the customers we have and what we can add when the evidence tells us we need it.”
For Kauffman, testing assumptions is not about eliminating risk from entrepreneurship. Starting something new will always involve decisions made with incomplete information.
The more practical objective is knowing where the uncertainty is.
“You are going to be wrong about something,” Kauffman said. “I think the useful question is whether you can find out what you are wrong about while it is still relatively easy to change.”
About Darryl Kauffman
Darryl Kauffman is a Las Vegas-based accountant, business consultant, entrepreneur, and business coach with decades of experience across public accounting, corporate finance, operations, and business ownership. His career has included financial and leadership roles with Strings Restaurants, Dole, and McDonald’s, as well as independent accounting and consulting work.
Kauffman earned his MBA from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a dual program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in New Venture Management and Quantitative Finance. His current professional interests include business coaching, entrepreneurship, merchant services, financial analysis, and helping business owners examine the assumptions behind operational and strategic decisions.
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