GTM Right's commercial validation engine runs six stages. Each stage builds on the previous one. The output is not a pass or fail - it is graded evidence that states what has been tested, how strong the evidence is, and what still needs to be proved.
Does a real market problem have credible live evidence? A market validation record that states the evidence, limits and next test.
Which specific, reachable buyer feels the pain most and can act? A ranked buyer thesis with testable triggers, access path and buying context.
What job is the offer hired for and what proves willingness to pay? A buyer and offer proposition with the evidence needed to test willingness to pay.
Can a stranger become a paying customer with viable economics? A testable revenue funnel with commercial assumptions, conversion steps and economics.
Is there a defensible entry point with viable market and funnel economics? A market-entry and funnel case that identifies the wedge and conditions to sustain it.
Are the material blockers known before capital or build spend is committed? A commercial decision record with proceed, revise or stop conditions.
Discovered market evidence: Relevant material the search found. It can be shown in a result, with the reason it does or does not count, without counting toward the result.
Qualifying evidence: The subset that passes source eligibility, relevance, integrity and independence rules. Only qualifying evidence can change the qualifying signal count, the grade or the verdict.
Founder-stated input: What a founder tells us about the idea is recorded as founder-stated, not as external proof. Specific observed evidence a founder reports, such as buyer interviews, written willingness to pay or pre-sales, can be credited under the grade policy, but it is still founder-provided rather than externally confirmed.
The highest grade Stage 1 awards. It requires sufficient independent qualifying evidence to support the finding. That can come from eligible public evidence or from multiple qualifying founder-provided evidence points under the grade policy. Public evidence must also satisfy the applicable relevance, eligibility and recency rules, and the counter-signal rules apply on either path. The finding is directionally consistent, not conclusive.
Either two or more independent eligible public sources supporting the same problem under the evidence rules, or multiple qualifying independent founder-provided evidence points such as documented buyer interviews, written willingness to pay or pre-sales. Verbal enthusiasm or a founder's own belief does not qualify.
Qualifying evidence exists, but the contract for a Strong Signal is incomplete: corroboration comes from a single origin rather than two independent ones, the source dates cannot be resolved, one qualifying counter-signal narrows the proposition, or the claim was only accepted in a narrowed form.
The grade fails closed. It is applied when no qualifying evidence is retained, when relevance or source eligibility fails, when the retained evidence is older than 24 months, when two or more independent counter-signals stand against the claim, or when retrieval did not complete successfully.
No eligible external evidence is retained for the problem, so the finding rests on the founder's own account. A retrieval failure also lands here - it is an operational outcome, not proof that the pain is absent.
A third-party compilation of 2,715 documented startup failures, one row per company, drawn from six public source lists: Loot Drop, a Kaggle dataset of CB Insights records, CB Insights, and three Failory cemetery lists. GTM Right did not collect these records through original fieldwork, and no customer work is added to it. The archive contains only companies that failed. There is no matched group of companies that survived, so it cannot show what successful companies do differently, and a count of records in a sector is not a failure rate. A cause of death is what a source reported, not a verified or tested cause. The patterns in the archive are directional, not causal, and nothing here shows that GTM Right would have prevented any failure. The archive also carries a stage label assigned under an earlier version of GTM Right's stage order. Those legacy assignments are not used on this page to count, rank, cost or otherwise quantify today's six-stage framework. These six lenses are GTM Right's editorial hypotheses for founders to test, one per current stage. They were not statistically derived from the 2,715 records, and they do not explain, predict or prevent any failure in the archive.
Stage analyses are generated by AI models working under fixed, versioned rules. Retrieval, source eligibility and grade caps are enforced in code rather than left to the model. You confirm the brief before a run, and the decision remains yours.
GTM Right does not guarantee demand, revenue, funding or commercial success. A Strong Signal means the available evidence is consistent; it does not mean customers will buy. A Weak Signal is not proof the idea will fail. Later stages test additional assumptions; they do not remove uncertainty.
Paid Canvas work across Stages 2 to 6, Commercial Readiness Pack. The commercial validation engine gives founders a structured record of what has been tested and what must be proved next.
Written by Paul Akinola, Founder, GTM Right. Last reviewed 2026-09-17. Corrections: support@gtmright.com.