Most case competitions give you an existing company and a problem someone has already identified. The company already knows who its customers are, so teams spend their time on a SWOT analysis and recommendations.
PREMISE starts where founders start, with a product that already works. Every team gets the same one and has a week to build a business around it, which means answering four questions:
- Who is it for?
- How does it make money?
- How does it reach customers?
- Why would it actually work?
At the end of the week, each team pitches its answers to the judges and defends them. Since everyone started from the same product, what separates the teams is the decisions they made.
The name comes from logic: a premise is the assumption an argument rests on. Each team picks one and spends the week trying to prove it.