How Scoring Works
How founders can improve their scores.
This guide explains the logic behind the scoring system.
Overall Approach
How the model evaluates a deck
The system scores a deck against one selected fundraising stage:
- Friends & Family
- Pre-Seed
- Early Seed
- Late Seed
- Series A
It then evaluates the deck across 47 topics grouped into 8 main headings. Each topic is judged using the same evidence ladder:
| Ladder step | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Considered | The topic is visibly present in the deck. |
| Explained | A reader can understand it without founder narration. |
| Specified | It includes concrete details, not just generic claims. |
| Evidenced | Claims are supported by visible proof in the deck or appendix. |
| Validated | The claim-plus-proof is strong, credible, stage-appropriate, and internally consistent. |
A few practical implications matter:
- A strong score is stage-aware. A great Friends & Family deck is not expected to look like a great Series A deck.
- Earlier stages can score well with disciplined discovery, sharp thinking, and credible early proof.
- Later stages need stronger current evidence of traction, repeatability, operating maturity, and scale readiness.
- Topic scores roll up into section scores, and section scores are simple averages of the topics underneath them.
- Partial credit exists when a topic is on the right track but not yet supported strongly enough to clear the next rung of the ladder.
Under the hood, the scoring engine is looking for things like clarity, specificity, named entities, visible proof, source/date discipline, claim-to-proof linkage, traction quality, repeatability, team credibility, financial coherence, and narrative consistency.
The 8 Headings
The structure of the scoring model
What Strong Answers Contain
1. Market opportunity and timing
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Vision / company category clarity | A crisp one-line description of what the company is, what category it belongs to, and the believable long-term ambition behind it. |
| Problem quality and urgency | A specific, painful problem with clear stakes, frequency, cost, risk, or urgency for a defined customer. |
| Customer / user definition | A precise description of the user, buyer, or stakeholder so an investor can picture exactly who the company is serving first. |
| Why now / market timing | Concrete reasons this is the right moment, tied to shifts in technology, regulation, behaviour, cost, distribution, or market structure. |
| Market opportunity | A credible view of the opportunity size that connects to the company’s actual wedge and growth path, not just a large top-down number. |
| Initial ICP and market wedge | A narrow first segment and use case that makes the first route to adoption feel focused, winnable, and commercially sensible. |
2. Solution and value proposition
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Solution clarity | A simple explanation of what the product or service does, for whom, and how it solves the problem better than the status quo. |
| Value proposition | A clear before-and-after improvement for the customer, expressed in practical operational, financial, or strategic terms. |
| Product demonstration / product credibility | Visible product proof such as screenshots, workflows, demo evidence, prototype artefacts, or deployment context that makes the solution feel real. |
| Product maturity and roadmap | An honest picture of what already exists today and a believable roadmap to the next product milestones that matter. |
3. Traction and validation
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Traction | Real market movement that is appropriate for the stage, showing the company has progressed beyond idea-only narrative. |
| Revenue progress | Clearly labelled actual revenue progress with understandable baselines, timeframes, and separation between actuals and projections. |
| Revenue quality | Evidence that revenue is meaningful and durable for the model through repeatability, retention, expansion, renewals, or quality of counterparties. |
| Customer evidence / pilots / design partners | Concrete proof that real customers, pilots, design partners, or counterparties are engaging in a meaningful way. |
| Usage, retention, and engagement | Evidence that users or customers are adopting, returning, progressing, or staying in ways that matter for the business model. |
| Pipeline quality | A qualified pipeline with clear buyer context, stage, route to close, and signs of real conversion rather than a loose prospect list. |
| Product-market fit evidence | Multiple signals that the product is solving a repeat problem, such as repeat usage, retention, expansion, or sustained adoption. |
| Repeatability of demand | Proof that demand is not a one-off and is appearing across multiple customers, users, cohorts, channels, or time periods. |
4. Commercial model and growth strategy
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Business model | A straightforward explanation of who pays, what they pay for, when they pay, and why the model fits customer behaviour. |
| Pricing and revenue mechanics | Pricing logic that is easy to follow and clearly linked to customer value, packaging, usage, contracts, or willingness to pay. |
| Go-to-market strategy | A believable route to first customers that matches the wedge, the buying motion, and the company’s current stage of learning. |
| Sales motion and channel logic | A clear picture of the buyer, the conversion path, and why the chosen channels, partner routes, or sales motion can actually work. |
| Unit economics | A credible view of the economic engine, showing the team understands what drives margin, payback, contribution, or efficiency. |
| Growth efficiency | Evidence that growth can become capital-efficient through stronger conversion, retention, channel performance, or operating leverage. |
5. Competitive position and defensibility
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Competitive landscape | An honest view of the real alternatives customers use today and how the company fits into that competitive context. |
| Differentiation | A specific reason the company wins that is visible in the product, model, market position, customer experience, or go-to-market approach. |
| Defensibility | A believable explanation of why the advantage can persist through data, workflow lock-in, distribution, product depth, process, or another durable edge. |
| IP ownership and IP strategy | Clear ownership of important IP and a sensible strategy for protecting, structuring, or leveraging it where relevant. |
| Regulatory, compliance, security, or enterprise-readiness issues | Recognition of the real trust, legal, security, compliance, or enterprise hurdles in the model, plus credible readiness or mitigation. |
6. Team and execution capability
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Team quality | A team that appears capable of building, selling, and operating the company at its current stage. |
| Founder-market fit | Strong evidence that the founders are especially well suited to this problem through domain insight, technical depth, lived experience, or access. |
| Headcount and hiring plan | A focused view of the key roles needed next and how those hires connect directly to the next stage of company progress. |
| Operating capability and process maturity | Proof that execution is becoming systematic through ownership, cadences, workflows, delivery process, or operating discipline. |
7. Financial plan and funding rationale
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Financial projections | A model that is internally coherent, easy to interpret, and tied to understandable business drivers rather than unsupported optimism. |
| Cash runway and burn discipline | A realistic grasp of burn, runway, trade-offs, and how capital will be stretched to reach the next important milestone. |
| Funding ask | A clearly stated raise amount that feels intentional and proportionate to the company’s stage and plan. |
| Use of funds | A direct connection between the raise and the concrete product, GTM, hiring, validation, or operational work it will fund. |
| Milestones unlocked by the round | Specific proof points the company expects this round to unlock, with a clear link to the next stage of financing or company readiness. |
| Stage appropriateness | A deck where the scale of the ask, the claims being made, and the evidence shown all feel matched to the stage. |
8. Investor readiness and communication quality
| Topic | What a top-scoring answer contains |
|---|---|
| Legal, governance, and cap table hygiene | Enough legal and ownership clarity that investors do not expect avoidable friction during diligence. |
| Supporting-material / investor-readiness materials | Clear signposting of the deeper material behind the deck so investors can see that important claims can be backed up. |
| Risk awareness and candor | Honest acknowledgement of the main risks, paired with credible mitigation, ownership, or learning plans. |
| Narrative coherence | A deck where the problem, customer, solution, traction, business model, team, and raise all reinforce one another. |
| Deck structure and flow | A presentation order that makes the investment case progressively easier to follow and easier to believe. |
| Slide clarity and density | Slides that are readable, not overloaded, and designed so the evidence can be extracted quickly and correctly. |
| Specificity and evidence quality | Concrete facts, examples, labels, units, dates, and proof points instead of broad, unsupported statements. |
| Memorability / investor retellability | A story simple and sharp enough that an investor can repeat the company, wedge, proof points, and why it matters after one read. |
Quickest Wins
The quickest ways to improve most scores
- Replace vague claims with claim-plus-proof pairs.
- Make every important number easy to interpret with labels, units, dates, and actual-vs-forecast separation.
- Narrow the first customer segment and first use case until the wedge feels obvious.
- Show stage-appropriate evidence: discovery at earlier stages, repeatability and operational proof at later stages.
- Remove contradictions between slides so the story feels consistent from problem through funding ask.
- Make the deck stand on its own without founder narration.