Grading the pitch
Most decks ship on a gut feel. I score mine first, against a rubric and against the ones that already won or lost.
I have made thousands of decks and proposals. For most of that run, the only test a deck got was my gut, and my gut on a Tuesday is not my gut on a Friday.
So I wrote the test down. Now every deck gets scored before it leaves, on a rubric: does the narrative arc hold, is the ask clear, does the proof actually land. Not a vibe. The same score, every time.
Proposals go one further, because proposals come with a scoreboard the world keeps for you: won or lost. I keep a library of past ones labeled with what actually happened. Before I send a new one, the system scores it against the winners and tells me, plainly, whether this looks like one that closes.
That part runs today, and so does the part I used to describe as the next step. The approval gate has four buttons instead of two: reject, approve, approve and benchmark when it beats the current best, and approve with a note when I almost killed it for a reason worth remembering. Two of those four buttons exist only to capture how I think, so the next pitch is graded on my taste, not a generic one. It has been live on real pitches since May.
How the deck itself became software you walk someone through, instead of a PDF you email, has its own piece. This one is about the grading.
Honest version: the outcomes do land back in the library, won or lost, with the why written down. But the score is not wired to the outcome automatically yet; a human still carries it across. That is the next camp. Scoring beats guessing, and we stopped guessing.