Go / no-go decision

Go / no-go decision

Everything in the pipeline — research, scoring, validation — exists to make one call possible: go or no-go. This is where you combine all the evidence, check the hard constraints, and commit to a path with the idea status workflow.

Assemble the evidence

A decision is only as good as its inputs. The Decide section brings together the four families of evidence the platform produces:

1. Scores

Your PMF score — the 0–100 weighted score with its proxy signals — plus your scorecards and prioritization rankings. These tell you how strong the opportunity looks.

2. Validation evidence

What real people did, not what they said in a friendly chat: survey responses and PMF bridge results, customer discovery themes, and — the strongest of all — fake-door metrics with real payment data. These tell you whether the demand is real.

3. IP & brand checks

The constraints that can kill an otherwise great idea: patent and freedom-to-operate screening, trademark conflict checks, and brand identity checks. A fantastic idea you can’t legally or practically brand is a different conversation.

4. Financials

The numbers behind the ambition: unit economics, runway, revenue projections, valuation, and fundraising models, plus equity design for how the upside gets shared. These tell you whether the business can work.

A framework for weighing it

There’s no single formula, but a useful pattern:

1. Kill on hard constraints first. If IP or brand checks surface an unworkable conflict, no score fixes that — resolve or move on.
2. Trust behavior over opinion. A fake-door test with real payments outweighs a great PMF score typed in from optimism. When scores and validation disagree, validation usually knows something scores don’t.
3. Check the financials against reality. A validated demand at a price that can’t support your unit economics is a pricing problem at best, a bad business at worst.
4. Be explicit about what’s still unknown. If the decision rests on an untested assumption, say so — and name the test that would resolve it.

Caution

The most common founder mistake isn’t deciding too late — it’s deciding “go” on evidence that was never collected. If you can’t name real behavioral evidence (payments, captured emails, strong survey response rates) for the go, you’re making a hope-based decision. That’s allowed — just be honest that you are.

The 6-stage idea workflow

The decision becomes real when you update the idea’s status. Every idea moves through six stages, shown on the kanban board:

1. Draft — the idea is captured, nothing validated yet.
2. Researching — you’re running research phases to understand the market.
3. Validating — you’re collecting evidence from real people: surveys, interviews, fake doors.
4. Building — you’ve committed; you’re building the product.
5. Launched — the product is live and getting feedback.
6. Dead — you’ve stopped working on it.

Move an idea to Building only when your evidence supports it; move it to Dead without guilt when it doesn’t. The status workflow is designed to make both moves explicit — a “dead” idea stops consuming your time, and the kanban keeps your whole portfolio honest at a glance.

The status also feeds the plan advisor, which suggests the next step based on where the idea is: an idea stuck in researching with no validation gets nudged toward validating; an idea in validating with strong fake-door numbers is ready for building.

What a decision looks like

• Go — evidence lines up (behavioral validation, financials work, no blocking IP/brand issues). Move the idea to Building and start.
• No-go — evidence doesn’t line up, or a hard constraint blocks you. Move the idea to Dead and redeploy your attention to the next candidate from the comparison dashboard.
• Not yet — evidence is incomplete on a specific point. Name the test, run it, and revisit. Keep the idea’s status honest in the meantime.

When you make the call, export your work — the evidence trail is valuable for your team, your investors, and future-you.