A plain-English brief on how the 10-axis scorecard works, a snapshot of what people scored this week, and the five pieces every Helmslee report actually contains. Built for the Independent bar or restaurant owner running 1–2 open mics per week, or a solo operator pricing a micro-SaaS wedge under $19/month, not for a quant who reads our source.
On this page
The scoring formula itself is deliberately not on this page. The math is the product; the page is the brief.
Methodology in plain English
The score exists so a venue owner or solo operator can decide whether the wedge is worth their Tuesday-night budget. This page exists so you can decide whether the score itself was built for you.
The scorecard is built for someone who has to ship a working wedge by Wednesday — not for someone with a research budget. The reader is the independent venue owner or the solo founder behind Independent bar or restaurant owner running 1–2 open mics per week. Every reading of the math is tuned for that voice: numbers first, caveats second, jargon last. If your read on a wedge depends on a 30-page methodology PDF, the score is not for you, and the page says so up front.
The scorecard spans vertical service businesses, regulated workflows, developer tooling, and two-sided marketplaces — plus single-sided vertical SaaS and physical-product outliers. The cohort table on this page shows which of those buckets real users ran in the last 50 accepted scoring submissions. We do not list every category here by design; the precise breakdown is one of the things the actual report contains.
The 'wedge' is the moment your idea has a defensible angle the incumbent does not cover — not the moment your score crosses a line. The scorecard penalises symmetric wedges (where the buyer can swap you in for the incumbent at zero friction) and rewards asymmetric ones (where the buyer cannot reverse the swap without re-doing the work). Why that matters: an asymmetric wedge means your first customer is harder to land but the next fifty are easier.
Latest cohort
The top six categories from the most recent 50 accepted scoring submissions. Aggregate counts only — no individual idea is shown, no user or session ID is exposed. Updated as new submissions land.
Empty until the first accepted submission. The number on the right is "of the most recent 50" so a small platform shows zeros, not "no data".
What a report contains
The benchmark page says how the math works. The report is the actual delivery — five pieces, each tied to a flow on the site, each already shipping.
The same deterministic 10-axis scoring run produced free on `/score`: demand, competition, profitability, scalability, automation, retention, SEO, virality, startup cost, and technical difficulty. The numbers plus the per-axis rationale, side-by-side, so the wedge is auditable without us re-writing the math.
Incumbent strength, switching cost, asymmetric advantage, and structural liability — surfaced on `/build/[slug]` for the wedge you just ran. Tells you how much of the headline score is actually free to take, not just how much demand is in the room.
Generated by the current `/build/[slug]` flow. Walks the named competitor set we expect you to bump into, the incumbents already in seat, and the angle that actually moves the buyer. It's the part most scorers skip — that's why we ship it.
Three tiers (Conservative / Base / Optimistic) of monthly revenue, each tied to three assumptions on `/pricing` — paying-customer count, the pricing tier you plan to ship, and the channels you actually have in week one. Every line item is named; the math is the same one a venue owner could run themselves before they sign up.
A pretty-printed v1 Make.com or n8n flow JSON plus a project README scaffold, generated from the passing scorecard at `/deploy/[slug]`. The mechanic for turning "this wedge has a score of 78" into "here is the workflow your buyer actually runs".
Run the scorecard
Send one sentence about your wedge. The same 10-axis engine that produces the cohort above returns a scored shortlist within the hour.
No sales funnel · no calendar link · no discount code.