Methodology

How we calibrate — and what we deliberately don't claim.

A score is only useful if you trust the method behind it. This page documents how Trigvale actually works: what the rubric measures, how the evidence pipeline pulls real-world signals, what calibration target we hold ourselves to, and — critically — the kind of claim we refuse to make even though it would look good in marketing.

The rubric

Every idea is scored as a Venture Readiness Score (VRS) — a 0–100 number across 10 weighted dimensions. The model scores each dimension against fixed 0/25/50/75/100 anchors that we publish in the project outline. The final number is then computed in code from the per-dimension inputs, so the math is stable across runs. The model never emits the final score directly.

The kill / pivot / test / build verdict is also computed in code from a small set of explicit gates. "Build" requires a conjunction of conditions and is rare by construction. We'd rather under-issue Build than over-issue it.

The dimensions and how each one is graded are deliberately public. Hiding them would gain us almost nothing — a frontier model can replicate a rubric from a one-shot prompt — and lose the trust signal that comes from publishing what we measure. The moats are the live evidence pipeline, the founder skill graph, and being the validation step inside your build agent — not the rubric itself.

Listed in priority order — the first dimension contributes the most to the final VRS, the last contributes the least. Each dimension is scored on a 0 / 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 ladder. The model picks the anchor description that best matches the evidence; the score is one of those five steps, not a freeform number. Below: every step on every ladder, in plain English.

Each dimension also has a critical floor — a per-dimension minimum below which the verdict cannot reach Build, regardless of the overall VRS. The model commits to one of the five anchors; the final VRS is then computed in code from the per-dimension inputs, so the math is stable across runs.

Live evidence sources

For every idea, Trigvale enriches the brief with real-world signals pulled on a schedule. These are kept separate from AI-generated or user-claimed evidence — sources are tagged in the brief and rendered in distinct sections so you can see what is observed versus inferred.

Live evidence

Reddit · 247 posts / 90d

GitHub · 1.2k repos · 18k★ top

Calibrated for you

Founder fit +11

Reachability −5

71

Sample VRS

test

Archetype solo-dev-tools

Live sources fire on every evaluate + every 6h via a background refresh; roadmap sources aren't implemented yet. Each brief shows which sources were available at scoring time.

Inter-rater agreement target

We hold our scoring against a hand-curated golden set of ideas with human-rated reference scores. The eval-harness gate is: verdict agreement ≥ 85% and VRS mean absolute error ≤ 8 across the set. A model upgrade or rubric change that misses the gate does not ship to users.

When you disagree with a score

Disagreement is information. Every brief lets you flag a dimension you think is mis-scored, with a short reason. Flags feed the calibration loop — they refine the anchors, surface ambiguity in the rubric, and (over time) personalise how your declared skill graph reweights specific dimensions. Disagreement does not retroactively change the verdict on the brief you flagged; it improves future briefs.

What we deliberately do not claim

The most honest thing on this page is what isn't on it. You will never see Trigvale publish:

• ×"Ideas at VRS X reach $Y MRR at Z%."
• ×"Trigvale was right N% of the time."
• ×"X% of Build verdicts succeed within Y months."
• ×"Our verdict correlates with founder success at Y%."

An idea's outcome is dominated by founder execution, marketing, distribution, timing, and luck. The rubric score is one term in a very noisy equation. With realistic data volumes (hundreds, not millions), we cannot disentangle idea quality from those confounders, so any predictive-accuracy claim would be statistically dishonest. Trigvale's job is to expose assumptions, not to forecast success.

Audit trail

Every saved brief preserves the rubric version, the model version, the evidence sources at the time of scoring, and the score breakdown. If we update the rubric or change a model, your past briefs continue to render under the conditions they were scored in, with a marker if a re-score would now produce a different result.