One formula. Evidence or a capped score.
Every opportunity on the board is scored by the same formula, from the same kinds of evidence, with the same caps. This page explains exactly how that score is computed, what the number on the ring means — and shows the honest statistics behind the leaderboards.
Four pillars, twelve dimensions
Each idea is scored on four weighted pillars. Every pillar is the average of three dimensions, each scored 0–10 with cited evidence. A small convergence bonus (capped at +10) rewards ideas that independent sources keep resurfacing, and reader feedback can adjust the total by at most ±5 — evidence always dominates.
Demand
30%Do people demonstrably have this problem?
- Pain severity
- Demand breadth
- Market size
Monetization
30%Will someone pay, and is the model clear?
- Willingness to pay
- Model clarity
- Comparable revenue
Buildability
20%Can a small team actually ship this?
- Feasibility
- Data availability
- Time to MVP
Openness
20%Is there durable white space left?
- White space
- Differentiation
- Gap durability
No verified evidence, no high score
Any dimension whose cited evidence cannot be verified is capped at 6 out of 10 before pillar averaging. An LLM asserting “huge demand” without a checkable citation cannot push an idea to the top.
Verification is also class-scoped: a URL only lifts the cap for pillars its kind of evidence can actually prove. A Reddit complaint proves demand — never monetization.
| Evidence class | Lifts the cap for | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Pain | Demand | Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub issues, Stack Exchange, app-store reviews, G2 |
| Repo / Research | Buildability | GitHub repositories, arXiv, Hugging Face |
| Market | Monetization, Openness, Demand | Product Hunt, marketplace listings (Atlassian, WordPress, Shopify), Y Combinator, SEC EDGAR, verifier-supported web results |
And one thing that never enters the formula: popularity. GitHub stars, upvotes and points are provenance — a filter on what is worth reading during discovery — but they are not quality, so they carry zero weight in the score.
The displayed score is a percentile
The formula produces an internal raw score. Because of the evidence cap, raw scores cluster below 60 — only ideas with verified evidence across their dimensions can rise above it. That clustering is honest, but it makes raw numbers hard to compare at a glance.
So the score you see is the idea’s percentile position on the board: all published ideas are spread evenly across 1–100 by raw score (ties broken by evidence count, then board rank), and the spread is refreshed after every discovery run. A displayed 90 means “stronger than ~90% of everything currently published” — not 90 points of absolute certainty.
Raw-score history is kept as an append-only series, so trend lines and movers always compare raw against raw — never a percentile against a formula total.
The distribution, unretouched
Live aggregates from the current board — the raw distribution the percentile spread is built from. No cherry-picking: this is the same data the leaderboards rank on.
Raw score distribution (2795 published ideas)
- 0–102
- 10–200
- 20–305
- 30–4085
- 40–50736
- 50–601442
- 60–70502
- 70–8022
- 80–901
- 90–1000
Displayed scores are the 1–100 percentile spread over this distribution (global percentile, refreshed every run) — which is why we chart raw scores here, not displayed ones.
18.8%
of published ideas score a raw 60+ — above the unverified ceiling, on verified evidence
0.8%
reach a raw 70+ — the strongest evidence-verified signals on the board
17.1%
of 33,540 scored dimensions were capped for lacking verified evidence — caps we publish, not hide
Evidence source mix
- Web search10,184
- Hacker News589
- GitHub564
- GitHub issues514
- Hugging Face351
- Reddit159
- Y Combinator104
- arXiv96
- Product Hunt92
- Atlassian Marketplace82
- Shopify App Store75
- Stack Exchange64
- WordPress.org59
- App Store reviews56
Board bookkeeping
- Published ideas
- 2,795
- Archived (never deleted)
- 60
- Business domains
- 44
- Evidence items stored
- 12,989
Ideas that fall off a leaderboard are archived, never deleted, and re-compete if their evidence resurfaces.
Now read the board knowing what the numbers mean.
Every opportunity ships with the evidence behind its score — open the citations and check us.