User Guide

How to Use Every Feature in zigzag

Educational guides for every step of the startup journey — from validating your idea to closing your first investment round. Written for first-time founders.

The zigzag startup journey

The guides below mostly follow the natural order of building a startup. The REFINE stage is about understanding your customers and defining your business model. The BUILD stage is about creating your product, your marketing materials, and your investor documents. The TRUST & COMPLIANCE guides explain how zigzag handles privacy, security, and accessibility. PROGRAM MANAGEMENT covers cohort and accelerator workflows.

📋REFINE

The Lean Canvas: Your Business Model on One Page

Before you build anything, you need to understand who you are building for and why they will care. The Lean Canvas is where that thinking starts.

8 min readRead guide →

🎯REFINE

Critical Hypotheses: Identifying What You Need to Prove

Every startup is built on assumptions. Critical hypotheses help you identify which assumptions carry the most risk — and which you should test first.

6 min readRead guide →

💬REFINE

The Validation Interview Guide: Questions That Actually Teach You Something

A good interview guide helps you have structured conversations with potential customers without leading them toward the answers you want to hear.

7 min readRead guide →

📧REFINE

Sending Surveys to Real People: Getting Useful Responses

Sending your validation questionnaire to potential customers is the step where your hypotheses meet reality. Here is how to do it well.

5 min readRead guide →

📊REFINE

Survey Analysis: Finding the Patterns That Matter

Your survey responses are raw data. Analysis is what turns that data into decisions you can act on.

6 min readRead guide →

🧪REFINE

Survey Analytics Dashboard: Turning Raw Responses into Clear Signals

Collecting responses is only the first half of validation. The Survey Analytics Dashboard helps you see what is happening, inspect what people actually said, and connect customer evidence back to your hypotheses.

9 min readRead guide →

🧭REFINE

Pivot Recommender: Knowing When the Evidence Is Telling You to Change Course

After you collect customer responses, the hardest question is whether weak validation is a small adjustment, a warning sign, or evidence that you should change direction. The Pivot Recommender helps you answer that question with more discipline.

9 min readRead guide →

🔗REFINE

Consistency Checker: Keeping Your Startup Story Internally Aligned

When you change one part of your startup story, other sections can quietly become outdated or contradictory. The Consistency Checker helps you catch those conflicts before they spread.

9 min readRead guide →

✨REFINE

Brand Elements: Defining Who Your Company Is

Your brand is not your logo. It is the set of values, personality traits, and voice characteristics that make your company distinctly recognizable.

7 min readRead guide →

💡REFINE

Choosing a Name for Your Startup

A name is the first thing most people will hear about your company. Here is how to choose one that works — and what to check before you commit.

5 min readRead guide →

🎨REFINE

Logo and Visual Assets: Your Visual Identity

A logo is the visual anchor of your brand. Here is when to create one, what to expect from the process, and why simplicity almost always wins.

5 min readRead guide →

🎤REFINE

The Elevator Pitch: Explaining Your Startup in 60 Seconds

An elevator pitch is not a party trick. It is a way to think about your startup with enough clarity to explain it to anyone, in any setting, without stumbling.

6 min readRead guide →

📄REFINE

The One-Pager: A Single Page That Tells Your Whole Story

A one-pager gives someone everything they need to understand your startup in the time it takes to read one page. Here is what goes in it and when to use it.

5 min readRead guide →

🌐BUILD

Building Your Landing Page: Your Company's First Impression Online

A landing page is more than a website. It is a live test of your value proposition with real visitors.

7 min readRead guide →

📝BUILD

MVP Requirements: Writing the Blueprint for What You Build

An MVP requirements document defines what your minimum viable product needs to do, who it is for, and how you will know whether it worked.

8 min readRead guide →

🏗️BUILD

Technical Diagram Editor: Mapping Your Architecture Visually

A good requirements document needs more than text. The Technical Diagram Editor gives you a visual architecture workspace inside zigzag so you can show how your system is meant to fit together before you build it.

8 min readRead guide →

🚀BUILD

Building Your MVP: From Requirements to Working Code

Building your first version of a product is one of the most challenging and most exciting parts of the startup journey. Here is how zigzag helps you get there faster.

7 min readRead guide →

🤖BUILD

Coding Agent: Turning Your MVP Requirements into a Working Codebase

The AI Coding Agent is zigzag’s spec-driven build workflow. It takes your requirements, expands them into an implementation plan and task list, then generates a downloadable MVP project you can review, run, and extend.

10 min readRead guide →

📁BUILD

The Investor Data Room: Everything an Investor Needs in One Place

An investor data room is a secure, organized collection of documents that investors review when they are seriously considering funding your startup.

8 min readRead guide →

📊BUILD

The Pitch Deck: Telling Your Story to Investors

A pitch deck is a short presentation that explains your startup to investors. Here is what goes in it, what investors look for, and how to make yours as strong as possible.

9 min readRead guide →

🔍BUILD

Market Research: Understanding the Size and Shape of Your Opportunity

Market research documents what you know about the industry you are entering — who the customers are, how big the market is, and what trends are shaping it.

7 min readRead guide →

⚔️BUILD

Competitive Analysis: Understanding Who Else Is Solving Your Problem

Knowing your competition is not just about listing other companies. It is about understanding why your approach is meaningfully different — and being honest about where it is not.

7 min readRead guide →

👥BUILD

Customer Discovery Findings: Documenting What You Learned From Real People

After running validation interviews and surveys, your findings need to be captured in a clear, shareable format. This document becomes some of your most compelling investor evidence.

6 min readRead guide →

💰BUILD

Use of Funds Breakdown: Showing Investors Where Their Money Will Go

Investors want to know not just how much you are raising, but exactly how you plan to use it. A clear use of funds breakdown answers that question before they ask.

6 min readRead guide →

📬BUILD

Investor Outreach: Reaching the Right Investors, the Right Way

Investor outreach is the process of identifying potential investors and making first contact. Here is how to approach it systematically and when you are ready to start.

6 min readRead guide →

📋BUILD

Investor Tracking: Managing Your Fundraising Pipeline

Fundraising is a process that can involve dozens of simultaneous conversations. Tracking them systematically is what separates a well-run fundraise from a chaotic one.

5 min readRead guide →

🔒TRUST

Privacy at zigzag: Our Privacy Policy Explained

Privacy policies are usually written for lawyers. This guide explains, in normal language, what data zigzag collects, why we collect it, what we never do with it, and what control you have.

10 min readRead guide →

🛡️TRUST

Trust Centre and Accessibility (VPAT): How zigzag Shows Its Work

Trust is not a slogan. It is the evidence behind your policies, security practices, retention rules, and accessibility commitments. This guide explains what you will find in zigzag's Trust Centre and VPAT, and why those pages exist.

10 min readRead guide →

🤝Program Management

Team Collaboration and Permissions: Working in the Same Project Without Colliding

Zigzag lets founders and teammates work inside the same project while keeping responsibilities clear. This guide explains invitations, roles, permissions, and the live presence features that make shared editing workable.

8 min readRead guide →

🏢Program Management

Admin Projects: Managing a Startup Cohort or Accelerator Program

If you are running an accelerator, incubator, or innovation program, Admin Projects gives you a structured overview of every startup team and their progress.

6 min readRead guide →

📈Program Management

Program Analytics: Tracking Progress Across Your Entire Cohort

The Analytics dashboard gives program managers a real-time view of how their startup cohort is progressing through zigzag — in aggregate and at the individual project level.

5 min readRead guide →

Ready to put these guides into practice?

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