Where Niche Scoring Breaks at Scale (First-Time Founders)

Niche scoring is fifteen minutes per round. Past the third or fourth round, specific failure modes appear. Here is what fails.

Score Inflation Drift

Each subsequent round, your scoring drifts upward. The third round gives most candidates 30+. The numbers stop discriminating. Fix: re-anchor each round against round one. Same scale, same honesty.

Candidate Reuse

You keep re-scoring the same five candidates with slightly different tweaks. The exercise becomes confirmation. Fix: introduce two new candidates per round.

Criterion Fatigue

By round five you stop thinking about reachability seriously and just type a number. Fix: rotate which criterion gets the deep think each round. One criterion per round gets a real fifteen-minute analysis.

Outsider Re-Score Decay

Early rounds you had an advisor sanity-check. Later rounds you skip it. Fix: keep one outside reviewer in the loop indefinitely. Founder bias does not go away.

Spreadsheet Sprawl

You build a more elaborate spreadsheet each round. Fix: keep the same simple sheet. The complexity does not improve decisions, only delays them.

The Bigger Pattern

Niche scoring stays useful as long as it stays cheap. The moment it becomes a project, it has stopped working. Hold it to fifteen minutes per round forever.