How the evaluation works

The backbone is Making Strategies Work (MSW), the strategy-implementation method taught in the Edinburgh Business School MBA: a mission, an honest scan of what helps and what blocks you, a strategy that answers those barriers, the few factors that must go right, and the activities that deliver them — each measured, each connected by an explicit cause-and-effect chain. Where MSW doesn't reach, mainly early validation and unit economics, we add well-established tools.

Built by THNK Consultancy

At THNK Consultancy we often help startups and businesses evaluate their ideas. Venture Vetter puts that thought process and experience into one guided flow, so you can validate an idea on your own, without having to come back to us.

We remain available when you need more: a deeper evaluation of your idea, or further analysis of the numbers and the market.

The frameworks, in plain language

• Jobs-to-be-done and the value proposition canvas — what the customer is trying to get done, what hurts, and whether your offer relieves those specific pains.
• Lean canvas and riskiest assumptions — the whole business on one page, and the beliefs most likely to kill it, ranked by impact and evidence.
• Bottom-up market sizing — customers × price × frequency, checked against a top-down figure.
• Porter's five forces, PESTEL, and MSW barriers and enablers — whether the industry allows profit, and what specifically helps or blocks you, each with an indicator to watch.
• VRIO, positioning, trade-offs and activity fit — whether your advantage is valuable, rare, hard to copy and organised to exploit, and what you will deliberately not do.
• Unit economics — lifetime value, fully-loaded acquisition cost, payback, break-even and three scenarios.
• Critical success factors and critical activities — each starts with “We must…”, passes a necessary-and-sufficient test, and has leading and lagging indicators.
• OKRs, RACIS and a control dashboard — who is responsible, who supports, and which numbers trigger a change of course.
• Pre-mortem and causal-chain risk — imagine it failed, explain why, then test every link for failure to deliver and unintended effects.

Evidence tags

Every material number is tagged S (sourced from research we performed), U (you told us), E (our estimate, with the derivation) or A (an assumption to test). We never invent statistics, company names or links; unknowns stay unknown.

The score and the verdict

Eight dimensions are scored 1–5 and weighted 15/10/10/15/15/10/15/10. Points per dimension = (score − 1) ÷ 4 × weight, so a uniformly “plausible but unproven” idea lands at 50. The total maps to a verdict: 75 and above Go, 60–74 Go with conditions, 45–59 Validate first, 30–44 Pivot, below 30 No-go.

Three rules override the score: a fatal flaw forces Pivot or No-go; low evidence confidence caps the verdict at Validate first; and an idea that fails the first gate (no painful problem for a reachable customer) can do no better than Pivot. The score is recomputed in code from these rules — the language model's arithmetic is never trusted.

What it is not

It is not legal, tax or investment advice, and it does not guarantee success. It is a disciplined first pass that tells you what to test next.