Three levels
of verification.
Every number a founder shows you says how we know it. The badge is shaped and worded differently at each level, never just a different colour, so it still works in black and white.
Strongest — we read it ourselves
Read directly from the founder's billing or analytics provider through a read-only connection, refreshed weekly.
Used for: money coming in, people using it, people leaving. Nobody in the pilot has this yet — read-only connections are not built, so no number on this site currently carries it.Middle — a person checked it, on a date
A human checked a screenshot, export, or dashboard against the claim on a specific date. The date is part of the badge, and it visibly ages.
Used for: how many people stick aroundWeakest — nobody has checked
The founder said so and nobody has checked. Never allowed on a headline metric or a share card.
Used for: numbers we print but never enlarge — never at headline size, never on a share card, and never without this badge beside itNobody gets listed on their own word alone.
At minimum, a person has to have checked the numbers. Founders choose how much to show — a range or an exact figure, live or delayed — but they cannot go below that and stay on the site. A checked badge always carries the date, and it visibly fades after 30 days, because a check from six months ago is not the same thing as a check from Tuesday.
Verified, not unrestricted. Anything we publish, we can point at a source for. Anything we cannot, we band, label, or leave out. Precision we cannot defend is a lie with decimal places.
The figures this site prints about itself — how many founders are listed, how many experiments have been published, how much is in a pot — carry no verification level, because there is nothing to verify beyond counting. They are tallies of what is on these pages, and you can check every one of them by counting the page yourself. That is the only claim we make for them.
Anything we cannot show you that way, we do not print. There are no traffic figures, no signup counts and no pilot outcomes on this site, because none of those could be checked by a reader and we are not asking you to take our word for numbers we would not accept from a founder.
Colour is never the only clue
Every badge says its meaning in words. So does every result. If you are colour-blind, or you print the page in black and white, you lose nothing. It is also why a good result and a bad one are drawn exactly the same size.
What we will not do
We do not publish a number we cannot point at a source for. We do not round a range until it looks better. We do not quietly upgrade a badge. If we lose access to a number, the badge gets weaker — the number does not quietly disappear.