The Readiness Standard · v1.0

What we score, and what each score means.

Published in full, before you tell us anything. If a rubric is precise enough to act on, it is precise enough to show you — and a standard you can read is one you can argue with.

Nine dimensions, a hundred points

The weights are not an institutional investor’s, because an institutional investor does not look at this stage. Traction is weighted low deliberately. Drive and evidence carry the page.

Drive & self-reliance

Sustained effort without external validation. Skin in the game. Perseverance that produces pivots, not zombie companies.

The heaviest weight on the page, and deliberately so. At idea stage there is almost nothing else to measure that has not been borrowed, bought, or asserted. What we are reading is whether you kept going in the months when nobody was watching and nothing was working — and whether that persistence produced changes of direction rather than a longer walk in the same one.

18points

Edge

Founder–market fit as asymmetry, not well-roundedness. Technical, market, or catalyst edge — plus network reach to a real buyer.

Not whether you are good. Whether you are unreasonably well-suited to this specific problem in a way a competent stranger could not copy in a quarter. A career's worth of context in the industry counts. So does being the person the buyer already takes calls from. Being generally capable does not.

16points

Evidence

Documented customer commitment. Money, time, or reputation actually given up. Discounted hard when undocumented.

Rob Fitzpatrick's three currencies. A customer who gave up none of them produced no evidence, however enthusiastic the conversation was. Enthusiasm is not a currency. An intro to their boss is.

16points

Problem quality

Popular, growing, urgent, expensive, frequent. One point each, evidence-anchored.

Kevin Hale's five. Each one has to be shown rather than claimed — a problem is expensive because you can name what it currently costs someone, not because it feels like it should be.

10points

Market & scale path

Bottom-up arithmetic to a real number. Calibrated to Southeast Asia, not to Sand Hill Road.

Built from customers, prices and frequency you can defend, not from a percentage of an analyst's total. The number that matters here is smaller than the number a US deck would carry, and pretending otherwise costs you points rather than earning them.

10points

Velocity

What actually shipped in the last 30 days. Iteration measured in weeks, not quarters.

A short, hard window, because it is the one thing on this page that cannot be reconstructed after the fact. What went live, what changed because of what you learned, and how long the loop took.

10points

Clarity

Can they explain it.

Y Combinator names failure to communicate as a leading reason promising teams get passed over. If the idea only survives with you in the room, it does not survive a partner meeting, a hire, or a customer's internal champion repeating it to their boss.

8points

Governance readiness

Cap table, vesting, IP assignment, entity, disclosure willingness. Cheap to fix early, fatal to fix late.

Low weight because it is rarely why a company wins, and here because it is regularly why one dies. Unassigned IP from a contractor and equity held by someone who left are both trivial to fix this month and close to unfixable at Series A.

6points

Kerith fit

Can a product studio move this business in 90 days. Would hands-on work be welcome.

An honest question about us, not about you. Some excellent companies score low here simply because building software faster is not their constraint — which is a reason we are the wrong people, not a reason the company is wrong.

6points

The 0–5 anchors

Every dimension is scored against the same six anchors, so that scores stay comparable between companies and across time. The distance that matters most is between 1 and 3 — the gap between something asserted and something shown.

0: Absent, or contradicted by the evidence supplied.
1: Asserted with nothing behind it. Opinion, intention, or a survey.
2: Some real signal, but thin, one-off, or not yet repeated.
3: Partial proof. Credible, documented, but incomplete.
4: Strong, documented, and repeated more than once.
5: Unambiguous, verified by a third party, and hard to explain away.

Two mechanics that do most of the filtering

The verification multiplier

Any claim made without an uploaded artifact scores at half on Evidence. A letter of intent you describe is worth half a letter of intent you attach. This single rule does more work than anything else on the page, and it is not a trick — attach the document and it never applies to you.

The edge floor

No credible unfair advantage caps Edge at 1, whatever else the answer says. Being capable, hard-working and available is not an edge. Knowing something specific that most people trying this would not is.

What comes back

You get your band, your score on each of the nine dimensions, and specific homework — at a permanent link you can come back to. That happens whether or not we engage, and it happens on submit.

Qualified

70 and above

The evidence holds up and the gaps are ordinary ones. We will read this properly and come back to you ourselves.

Real signal, material gaps

50 – 69

Something here is genuinely working, and something specific is missing. Your result names which dimensions cost you the points and what would move them. Most companies at this stage land here, and the path back is short.

Not a fit

Below 50

Not a fit for us, at least as things stand. That is a judgment about a match, not a verdict on the company — we look at one narrow stage, and plenty of good businesses sit outside it.

Not ready to assess

Unscored

There is not enough in the submission to score fairly yet. Your result says exactly what was missing, and you are welcome to come back once you have it. This is not a rejection.

A score is a first pass, not a verdict — and it is a starting point for a conversation, not a door closing.

Where the anchors came from

Almost none of this is original. The thresholds are borrowed from people who published theirs, because a borrowed threshold you can check beats an invented one you cannot.

Bill Payne / Angel Capital AssociationScorecard valuation method — weights, and the deal-killer overlay
Steve BlankInvestment Readiness Level; the NSF I-Corps 100-interview standard
Rob FitzpatrickThe Mom Test — the three currencies of commitment
Kevin Hale / Y CombinatorProblem quality, and the unfair-advantage threshold
TechstarsDead equity as a diligence item
Entrepreneur FirstEdge; motivation as a predictor of outcome
Founder InstituteCuriosity, perseverance and self-reliance across 250,000 assessments
Antler, IterativeSoutheast Asia calibration
Hustle FundThe reusable scorecard and traffic-light triage

Read it, then decide whether it describes you.

Submit your company