January 2013. A guy who had never written a technical document in his life opened a Word doc, typed some bullet points, and stopped after two pages. Two. That document — laughable, half-baked, missing entire sections a real engineer would have demanded — turned into a piece of software that hundreds of universities used and a private equity firm eventually acquired for eight figures.

What if the reason your idea is still in your head is that you're waiting to become the kind of person who writes a "real" spec?

In Episode 22 of Starting Up, host Jay Sensi shows the original two-page Word document he wrote for My College Roomie. He explains why it worked despite being embarrassingly simple, the "it's like X but for Y" shortcut that let a non-technical founder communicate a full product vision without a single wireframe, and why writing  ...