Every startup has a number. Most of the ones on offer measure how fundable you look. Ours measures how well the company runs, which is a different question, and a more useful one if you’re the person who has to run it on Monday.
The six pillars
- Clarity: can you say who it’s for and why they switch, in one sentence, without a deck?
- Product: does the thing exist, does it work, and is anyone using it without being asked?
- Demand: do customers arrive through a channel you can describe and repeat?
- Economics: do you know what a customer costs, what they’re worth, and how long the money lasts?
- Structure: cap table, contracts, IP and compliance: would a data room survive contact with a lawyer?
- Execution: the gap between what you said you’d do last month and what happened.
The two everyone gets wrong
Founders over-score Clarity and under-score Structure, almost without exception.
Clarity feels solved because you’ve said the sentence a hundred times, to friends, to your co-founder, to yourself in the shower. Fluency isn’t clarity. The test isn’t whether you can say it; it’s whether a stranger can repeat it back and get it right.
Structure gets under-scored because nothing has broken yet. Cap tables, IP assignment and contractor agreements are invisible right up until a term sheet makes them the only thing anyone wants to talk about. By then the cheap fix is gone.
What you get back
A free report: your archetype, your top three constraints in order, and one clear next move. It’s yours whether or not we ever work together, and it’s deliberately written so you could hand it to someone else to execute.
What it’s not
It isn’t a lead magnet with a score glued on, and it doesn’t flatter you: the average first score is in the forties. If it comes back low, that isn’t a sales hook. It’s usually the roadmap conversation, not the cohort one.
