Niche Scoring Checklist for First-Time Founders

The working checklist. Skip the reading, run the steps. Fifteen minutes.

Setup

• Open a doc or spreadsheet.
• Five rows, one per candidate niche.
• Five columns, one per criterion.

List Five Candidates

• One niche you are excited about.
• Two adjacent niches.
• Two unrelated niches you would not pick by gut.

Score Each on Five Criteria (1-10)

• Reachability (can you reach without paid ads, channel specifics).
• Pain frequency (daily/weekly/monthly trigger event).
• Existing spend (current spend on adjacent solutions).
• Differentiation (specific mechanism vs slogan).
• Builder-fit (unfair advantage you actually have).

Sanity Check

• For top two candidates, write one paragraph "why this would work" and one "why it would not."
• If "not work" is more concrete, score is wrong.

Pick and Move

• Highest total wins.
• Schedule five problem interviews against it this week.
• If interviews kill it, re-score five new candidates.

Anti-Patterns

• Only one candidate. Add four.
• Inflated builder-fit. Score honestly.
• Reachability score with no channel named. Score lower.
• Three weeks of scoring. Cap it at fifteen minutes.