Where Niche Scoring Breaks at Scale (Technical Founders)

Past the third or fourth scoring round, specific failure modes appear for technical founders.

Spreadsheet Sprawl

Engineers add columns each round - confidence intervals, weights, sensitivity analysis. The complexity does not improve decisions. Hold the same simple six-column sheet.

Score Inflation

Each round gives most candidates 30+. The numbers stop discriminating. Re-anchor each round against round one. Same scale.

Engineering-Capability Confusion

Founders revert to scoring builder-fit by capability. Catch this each round. Builder-fit is audience and trust.

Outside Review Decay

Early rounds you got an advisor sanity-check. Later rounds you skip it. Founder bias does not go away. Keep the outside reviewer in.

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.