You can build it now. Can you sell it?

What the scorecard actually measures

Eleven questions, scored out of 100, across five areas. It is not a personality test and it is not a quiz about your idea, it is a read on how much evidence you have that somebody other than you wants this thing.

• Customer proof, 40 points. How many people in your market you have actually spoken to, and what came back. This is prove it, and it carries the most weight because it is the only thing that settles the question.
• Clarity, 20 points. Whether you can say what you are building and who it is for, in one sentence, to someone outside your industry. This is define it.
• Build discipline, 20 points. Where your time has gone in the last month, and whether you would know what to do if you could not touch the product for thirty days. This one measures the build trap directly.
• Offer readiness, 12 points. Whether there is something specific someone could say yes to this week, at a price. This is sell it.
• Portability, 8 points. What would break if this worked and you wanted to sell it in a second country next year. Also define it, which is why it is worth so little on its own.

Three steps, and three things that stop people getting through them. The build trap, where building is more comfortable than talking to anyone. Not ready, where the conversations wait for a product that is never finished. And scared to charge, where you have the conversations but never say a number out loud. Your lowest area usually tells you which one has you.

How do I know if my idea is ready to sell?

The honest answer is that you do not know from thinking about it, you know from the pattern in your conversations. Three signals matter more than anything else. Somebody has described the problem back to you in their own words before you explained it. Somebody has asked what it costs without you raising price first. And somebody has told you about the workaround they already use, because a workaround is proof the problem is worth money to them.

If none of those three has happened yet, the idea is not unready because it is bad. It is unready because it has not been tested, and that is a different problem with a much faster fix.

Why does building first not count as progress?

Because the thing that kills most of these is not a bad build, it is a missing buyer. CB Insights, reviewing 101 startup post-mortems in its "Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail", found 42 percent shared one issue, there was no market need. The updated 2024 edition, drawn from 431 failed startups, puts poor product-market fit at roughly 43 percent.

AI removed the constraint on building. It did nothing at all to the constraint on finding someone who wants it. So a month spent shipping features while nobody in your market has heard of you scores low here, even if the product is genuinely good.

Who is this built for?

People with fifteen years or more in one industry, usually in their forties or fifties, who have either an idea they started and never finished or something they have already built with AI that nobody is paying for. If you have not started anything at all it is a little early, and if you already have paying customers you are past it. It is not built for people who already have paying customers, and if that is you the scorecard will say so and send you somewhere more useful.

What happens after you get your score

Your score appears on this page straight away, with the breakdown across all five areas and the single thing to fix next. There is no login and no gate on the number itself. If you want the longer written version, you can leave an email and I will send it, and if you would rather not, the score is still yours.

If your weakest area turns out to be customer proof, that is what the Global Day Zero Sprint is built around: eight weeks, at least twenty-five conversations, a pilot offer live, and a verdict either way.