Proof

Proof is where belief becomes evidence. The purpose of this phase is not to stay busy. It is to reduce uncertainty around the parts of the business that matter most before you spend serious time, money, or product effort.

Overview

The Overview tab is the synthesis layer for the whole phase. It summarizes assumptions, tests, interviews, recurring insights, readiness, and proof category coverage so you can see whether the project is actually getting stronger.

Key signals:

• Proof confidence: A directional rollup of how much meaningful evidence you have collected.
• Readiness bars: Coverage across problem, demand, solution, pricing, channel, and retention proof.
• Assumption status mix: Whether the risky beliefs are still mostly unvalidated.
• Test status mix: Whether experiments are planned, running, validated, or invalidated.
• Interview coverage: How much real customer contact you have completed.
• Recurring pains and objections: The patterns showing up repeatedly in conversations.
• Decision watch: Whether the current evidence points toward continuing, revising, pausing, or killing the idea.

Why it matters:

• Founders can easily mistake activity for validation.
• Overview helps you judge whether the business thesis is actually getting more credible.

Tips:

• If proof confidence looks strong but the readiness bars are uneven, you probably have blind spots.
• Revisit the overview after every few tests or interviews, not only at the end.
• Weak overview sections usually mean the underlying tabs need sharper inputs, not more optimism.

Assumptions

Assumptions are the statements your business depends on being true. This tab is where you make the risky parts of the plan explicit enough to test.

Key fields:

• Statement: The belief you are relying on.
• Category: Market, customer, product, or business model.
• Status: Unvalidated, validated, or invalidated.
• Risk level: How dangerous it would be if this assumption is wrong.
• Confidence: How strongly you currently believe it.
• Importance: How much the business depends on it being true.
• Evidence notes: The proof or reasoning you have so far.
• Owner: Who is responsible for moving the assumption toward evidence.
• Decision: What the current evidence suggests you should do next.
• Proof categories: The type of proof this assumption contributes to, such as demand or pricing.
• Linked tests: Experiments that are trying to validate the assumption.
• Linked interviews: Interviews that produced supporting or conflicting evidence.

Why it matters:

• Hidden assumptions are where founders usually get blindsided.
• Writing them clearly makes it easier to prioritize the most dangerous unknowns first.

Tips:

• A useful assumption is specific enough to be disproven.
• Start with the beliefs that would do the most damage if false.
• Keep invalidated assumptions visible. They are evidence, not embarrassment.

Validation Tests

Validation Tests turn assumptions into structured experiments. A good test is specific, measurable, and tied to a decision rather than vague learning.

Key fields:

• Title: Short name of the test.
• Hypothesis: The claim you are trying to confirm or reject.
• Test type: Landing page, outreach, concierge test, pricing test, demo, survey, or similar.
• Success criteria: What outcome counts as success before the test runs.
• Status: Planned, running, validated, or invalidated.
• Result summary: What happened in plain language.
• Next action: The immediate step after reviewing the result.
• Metric: The number you care about.
• Target value: What the test needed to hit.
• Actual value: What actually happened.
• Test channel: Where the test ran, such as email, ads, community, or direct outreach.
• Audience: Who the test targeted.
• Cost: What the test required financially.
• Start / end date: The test window.
• Decision: The operational conclusion from the result.
• Linked assumption: The assumption the test is meant to inform.
• Linked interviews: Interviews that shaped or explained the result.
• Proof categories: Which type of proof the test contributes to.

Why it matters:

• Tests without clear criteria often create false confidence.
• The target-vs-actual view is what makes the result actionable instead of interpretive.

Tips:

• Decide success criteria before you run the test.
• Keep tests cheap when possible. The point is evidence, not production polish.
• If the result is unclear, refine the next test rather than forcing certainty.

Interviews

Interviews are customer-discovery conversations, not hiring interviews. They help you understand pain, urgency, alternatives, willingness to act, and whether the problem is commercially meaningful.

Key fields:

• Name: The person you spoke with.
• Status: Queued, scheduled, or done.
• Persona: The type of customer they represent.
• Company: Their company or context when relevant.
• Segment: The market slice they belong to.
• Source channel: How you found or reached them.
• Interviewer: Who conducted the conversation.
• Interview type: Discovery, follow-up, pricing, or similar.
• Interview date: When it happened.
• Duration: How long the conversation lasted.
• Notes: Main observations from the discussion.
• Quoted pain points: Direct language from the interviewee.
• Current solution: How they solve the problem today.
• Objections: Why they may resist changing behavior or buying.
• Pain severity: How painful the problem is.
• Urgency: How quickly they want relief.
• Buying intent: Directional read on whether they would act.
• Budget signal: Whether there is budget reality behind the problem.
• Willing to pay: A read on commercial potential.
• Interview outcome: Your summary judgment after reviewing the whole conversation.
• Follow-up needed: Whether more contact is required.
• Linked assumptions: The beliefs this interview informs.
• Proof categories: Which proof areas the interview contributes to.

Why it matters:

• Interviews help separate polite interest from real pain and buying behavior.
• They also surface language, objections, and alternatives that no dashboard can invent for you.

Tips:

• Ask about behavior, not hypotheticals.
• Capture exact phrases when possible. They are more useful than cleaned-up summaries.
• One strong interview is helpful, but patterns across interviews are what really matter.

Proof Categories

Proof categories help you understand what kind of evidence you actually have. Assumptions, tests, and interviews are methods. Categories tell you what the evidence is proving.

Key categories:

• Problem proof: Evidence that the pain is real, repeated, and important.
• Demand proof: Evidence that people react strongly enough to take action.
• Solution proof: Evidence that the proposed solution shape is believable or attractive.
• Pricing proof: Evidence that buyers will tolerate the monetization model and price range.
• Channel proof: Evidence that you can reach the right audience effectively.
• Retention proof: Evidence that value lasts beyond initial curiosity or first use.

Why it matters:

• It is possible to have many interviews and tests while still being weak in a critical proof area.
• Category coverage helps prevent that kind of false completeness.

Tips:

• Tag items honestly. Not every interview contributes to every category.
• Weak category coverage usually points to the next best validation move.
• Pricing and channel proof are often thinner than founders think.

Evidence Trail

The Evidence Trail tab records every piece of proof collected during the validation process - test results, interview takeaways, decision events, and confidence changes - in a single chronological timeline.

Key concepts:

• Evidence items: Each item records what was learned, the source (test, interview, observation, external), the proof category it supports, and a confidence impact (positive, negative, neutral).
• Decision events: Logged when the team makes a significant validation decision - continue, pivot, pause, or kill. Each event records the rationale and links to the evidence that informed it.
• Confidence tracking: The timeline shows how overall confidence in the business thesis has changed over time. Each evidence item contributes a directional signal. The cumulative view helps founders see whether evidence is actually building toward conviction or just accumulating without direction.
• Timeline view: Items are shown newest-first. Filter by source type, proof category, or confidence impact to focus on specific evidence threads.

Tips:

• Log evidence as it happens, not in batches at the end of a sprint.
• Decision events are the most important entries - they are the moments where evidence turned into action.
• If confidence has been flat for weeks despite new evidence, the evidence may not be testing the right things.

Forms

The Forms tab lets you create structured data collection forms - surveys, signup forms, feedback forms, interest checks - that feed directly into your proof evidence and contact pipeline.

Key concepts:

• Form builder: Create forms with a title, description, fields, and optional conditional logic. Fields support text, email, textarea, select, multi-select, checkbox, radio, number, date, and URL types.
• Conditional logic: Show or hide fields based on previous answers. This keeps forms short for most respondents while collecting deeper detail when relevant.
• Submission tracking: Every submission is recorded with respondent metadata (email, IP hash, user agent hash, UTM parameters). View submissions in a table with filtering and export.
• Analytics: Track submission counts, completion rates, and response patterns over time. The analytics tab shows submission volume, field-level response distributions, and conversion metrics.
• Webhooks: Configure webhook URLs to push submission data to external tools in real time. Each webhook logs delivery status and supports retry.
• Contact routing: When a form submission includes an email address, the respondent is automatically upserted into Relationships as a contact with relevant tags and UTM metadata. This connects proof activity to your CRM without manual entry.
• reCAPTCHA protection: Public forms are protected by reCAPTCHA v3 to prevent spam submissions.
• Slug-based URLs: Each form gets a unique slug for embedding or sharing. The slug cannot be changed after creation.
• Status: Forms can be active (accepting submissions), paused, or archived.
• Max submissions: Optionally cap the number of responses a form will accept.

Tips:

• Use conditional logic to ask pricing questions only when a respondent indicates buying intent.
• Check the analytics tab weekly to see if submission rates are changing - it is an early signal of whether your outreach is working.
• Tag forms by proof category so evidence from submissions flows into the right part of the overview.
• Export submissions as CSV for deeper analysis or import into other tools.

Landing Pages

The Landing Pages tab lets you create simple, public-facing pages to test messaging, collect interest, and drive form submissions - all connected back to the Proof workspace.

Key concepts:

• Page builder: Create pages with a title, meta title, description, hero content, and call-to-action. Pages are rendered at a public URL based on their slug.
• Connected forms: Link a proof form to a landing page so submissions flow into the same evidence and contact pipeline.
• Submission tracking: View submissions collected through the landing page, including respondent metadata and UTM parameters.
• Custom domains: Optionally serve landing pages on a custom domain verified via DNS TXT record.
• Status: Pages can be active (publicly visible), paused, or archived. Paused pages show a "coming soon" state. Archived pages return a 404.
• Moderation: Landing pages go through a moderation queue before becoming publicly accessible. New pages start in "pending" status.
• Duplicate and archive: Clone an existing page to create variations for A/B testing different headlines or CTAs. Archive pages that are no longer needed.

Tips:

• Create multiple landing page variants with different headlines to test which message resonates most.
• Always connect a form to the page - a landing page without a data capture mechanism is a missed proof opportunity.
• Use UTM parameters in your outreach links to track which channels are driving the most landing page submissions.
• Review submission metadata to understand where respondents are coming from geographically and which devices they use.

Phase Gates

The Phase Gate Checklist is shown on the overview of each development phase. It evaluates whether the project is ready to advance to the next phase based on objective criteria.

Key concepts:

• Advisory checklist: Phase gates are informational, not blocking. They help founders see what is strong and what is still weak before deciding to advance.
• Gate criteria: Each transition (Clarity → Proof, Proof → Construction, Construction → Stability, Stability → Expansion) has specific gates. For example, advancing from Proof to Construction checks whether key assumptions are validated, whether interviews have been conducted, and whether evidence confidence is above a threshold.
• Status indicators: Each gate item shows a pass/fail status based on current project data. The checklist updates in real time as you add evidence, complete tests, or update assumptions.
• Override flow: If a gate is not met but you have good reason to proceed, you can acknowledge the gap and advance anyway. The override is recorded in the project history.

Tips:

• Review the phase gate checklist before requesting a phase change - it tells you exactly what the system considers ready vs. incomplete.
• Gates are meant to prompt reflection, not to slow you down. A project with two unmet gates and strong rationale for proceeding is better off advancing than waiting for artificial completeness.
• Use the unmet gates as a prioritization guide - they highlight the highest-value work remaining in the current phase.

Health Scorecard

The Health Scorecard provides a composite health score for your project across five dimensions, helping you understand overall project strength and identify weak areas.

Key concepts:

• Five dimensions: Clarity, Proof, Construction, Stability, and Expansion. Each dimension is scored based on weighted boolean items that check whether key activities have been completed.
• 26 weighted items: The score is calculated from 26 specific checks across all five dimensions - for example, whether competitors have been analyzed, assumptions validated, MVP scope defined, metrics tracked, and growth channels established.
• Current phase weighting: The dimension matching the project's current phase is weighted at 50% of the composite score. Other dimensions share the remaining 50%. This ensures the score reflects what matters most right now.
• Score display: The overall score is shown as a circle with a percentage. Each dimension shows its own score with an expandable checklist of individual items so you can see exactly what is contributing to or dragging down the score.
• Trend tracking: The scorecard updates in real time as project data changes, giving you a continuous health signal rather than a point-in-time assessment.

Tips:

• Focus on the items in your current phase first - they carry the most weight in the composite score.
• A low score in a future phase is expected and not a problem. A low score in your current phase is a signal to investigate.
• Use the expandable item checklists to find the specific gaps - the composite number is useful for trending, but the individual items are what you act on.