GTM Right runs a structured commercial validation engine across six dimensions of commercial readiness before a founder spends on acquisition. Each stage asks a single, non-negotiable question. The answer is graded against evidence, not conviction.
True Validation tests public market evidence only: whether the problem is real, visible and urgent. It does not prove buyer budget, willingness to pay, offer fit, acquisition economics or full commercial viability. Stages 2 to 6 test the later commercial assumptions: Buyer Precision, Buyer + Offer, Revenue Funnel, Market + Funnel, Commercial Decision. They do not change the fact that Stage 1 is market validation only.
The six stages are not a checklist. They are a dependency chain. Each stage answers a question that the next stage assumes is already answered. Running them out of order leaves later stages resting on assumptions that have not yet been tested.
True Validation establishes whether the commercial case deserves further investigation. Buyer Precision establishes which buyer must be tested first. Buyer + Offer establishes whether the offer is right for the buyer. Revenue Funnel establishes whether acquisition and conversion can work commercially. Market + Funnel establishes where to enter and how to sustain the motion. Commercial Decision establishes whether to proceed, revise or stop. The order is deliberate: each stage produces the context needed to test the next commercial assumption.
The sequencing is enforced by the product. A founder cannot unlock Buyer Precision until True Validation is complete.
Does a real market problem have credible live evidence?
Which specific, reachable buyer feels the pain most and can act?
What job is the offer hired for and what proves willingness to pay?
Can a stranger become a paying customer with viable economics?
Is there a defensible entry point with viable market and funnel economics?
Are the material blockers known before capital or build spend is committed?
Every stage output carries an evidence grade. The grade is not a verdict on the idea - it is a statement about the quality of the evidence available at the time of analysis. A Weak Signal does not mean the idea is wrong. It means there is not enough evidence to rely on that assumption yet.
The rules below govern the Stage 1 evidence grade, where the engine retrieves and checks public sources itself. Stages 2 to 6 carry the grade their own analysis returns and are not subject to the Stage 1 retrieval and counter-signal safeguard, so a grade in a later stage should be read alongside that stage's own stated evidence.
The highest grade Stage 1 awards. Stage 1 grades public-market validation, so it requires sufficient independent qualifying public or live market evidence to support the finding. That evidence must satisfy the applicable relevance, eligibility and recency rules, and the counter-signal rules apply. Founder-provided evidence is shown separately and can support a Medium Signal, but with no qualifying public evidence Stage 1 cannot be graded Strong. The finding is directionally consistent, not conclusive.
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.
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.
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.
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 evidence grade is a statement about the quality of the available evidence, not a prediction of commercial success.
Each Stage 1 result lists the assumptions the idea depends on and labels each one with one of three states:
Recommended next steps identify the evidence still missing.
When qualifying evidence is thin, the Stage 1 grade is capped by the rules above. A retrieval failure is reported as an operational outcome, not as proof that the pain is absent.
Each Stage 1 result records the versions of the source pipeline, grade rules, prompt and result schema that produced it.
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.
GTM Right Canvas is a one-time £349 purchase for one idea and 90 days. It includes paid work across Stages 2 to 6: Buyer Precision, Buyer + Offer, Revenue Funnel, Market + Funnel, Commercial Decision. The Commercial Readiness Pack is included and becomes available once all six stages are complete.
Stages 2 to 6 test the later commercial assumptions: Buyer Precision, Buyer + Offer, Revenue Funnel, Market + Funnel, Commercial Decision. They do not change the fact that Stage 1 is market validation only. After the initial 90-day access window ends, the same Canvas can be renewed for a one-time £149 purchase for another 90 days. Renewal is customer-initiated and does not renew automatically.
If you save your Stage 1 result, GTM Right emails a time-limited magic link that reopens that Workspace without a remembered password. If you later link that Workspace to an account, the authorised signed-in account can reopen it too.
The Canvas applies to one commercial proposition
The current paid Canvas access period
Buyer Precision, Buyer + Offer, Revenue Funnel, Market + Funnel, Commercial Decision
The versions below are read from the product code, so this record changes when the rules change. The review date changes when this page is reviewed.
True Validation is free. No card required. Describe your idea and the engine returns a market-validation record with the evidence, limits and next test, usually in under 90 seconds.
Your idea is used to retrieve market evidence and generate this result, and is stored with it — see our Privacy Policy for who can see it and how long it is kept. Privacy Policy