Startup.Ready.
Evaluate your startup's readiness for fundraising and accelerator applications.
Startup.Ready. is a startup readiness and decision intelligence platform that evaluates early-stage companies across six foundational pillars: Founder, Problem, Market, Business Model, Go-to-Market, and Financial clarity.
In approximately 20 minutes, founders complete a 33-question assessment and receive a structured Startup Readiness Score that provides a clear, diagnostic view of their startup's current state. The assessment identifies strengths, gaps, and areas of misalignment across each pillar, helping founders understand whether their startup is structurally prepared to move forward.
Unlike traditional checklists or planning tools, Startup.Ready. focuses on readiness rather than activity. It evaluates how well the core assumptions of a startup hold together across key areas of execution, decision-making, and market alignment.
The platform does not stop at the diagnosis. Your assessment answers route you to specific worksheets drawn from a library of 81, organized across the six pillars. You get your top three priorities, the work holding everything else back, and the full library to go deeper on any pillar. Do the work, retake the assessment, and track how your readiness profile shifts.
Startup.Ready. is live and in active development. The assessment layer and the worksheet-based development layer are both shipped and in use, including program and cohort dashboards for accelerators and a mentor dashboard for advisors. Document upload and analysis is in development.
The platform is designed for early-stage founders who want a structured way to evaluate their startup idea or current venture before building further, raising funding, or entering formal programs. It is also used by accelerators, incubators, and university entrepreneurship programs to baseline and track cohorts, and by mentors who want a shared read on a founder's foundation before the conversation starts.
Startup.Ready. is built by Dr. Shaun Digan, PhD in Entrepreneurship and author of Persuade (Wiley, 2021), with over 15 years of experience working with early-stage founders.
If you are an early stage founder, this tool was built for you. Free to try twice. No credit card required.
š¹ Startup Readiness Score (0-150). A quantified score that measures your startup's overall readiness, providing a clear snapshot of strengths, gaps, and execution risk.
š¹ Six-Pillar Startup Evaluation Framework. A structured framework that evaluates your startup across Founder, Problem, Market, Business Model, Go-to-Market, and Financial clarity.
š¹ 33-Question Structured Assessment (20 minutes). A guided assessment of self-ratings, multi-select, and short answer questions that converts your inputs into a structured readiness profile in approximately 20 minutes. Answers save after every question.
š¹ Pillar-Level Diagnostics and Gap Identification. Detailed diagnostics for each pillar that highlight where your startup is strong and where foundational gaps or misalignment exist.
š¹ 81-Worksheet Development Library. Your answers trigger flags, and those flags route you to specific worksheets across all six pillars. Top three priorities surfaced automatically. Full library available to browse and filter by pillar or priority.
š¹ Founder, Market, and Business Model Evaluation. Evaluates core assumptions around founder fit, target market clarity, and how value is created and captured within the business.
š¹ Go-to-Market and Financial Clarity Review. Assesses how you acquire customers and whether your cost structure, revenue logic, and timing are financially viable.
š¹ Progress Tracking Across Retakes. Retake the assessment after doing the work and track how your overall and pillar-level readiness shifts over time.
š¹ Program and Cohort Dashboards. Accelerators, incubators, and university programs create a cohort, send one link, and baseline the whole group. Cohort averages, pillar averages, progress at every check-in, and drill-down into any single founder.
š¹ Mentor and Advisor Access. Share your profile with a mentor through a one-time invite link. Mentors see your scores, your weakest pillars, and your assigned worksheets before the meeting. Free for mentors, with full access to all 81 worksheets.
š¹ Readiness-Based Startup Decision Support. Supports better decision-making by identifying what to prioritize next based on clarity, risk, and structural readiness rather than activity.
š¹ Document Analysis and Startup Knowledge Graph (in development). Upload your deck, model, or plan and have the platform read your assumptions directly out of your own documents. The underlying research is validated. The product surface is being built.
Use Cases
Validate your startup idea before you build
Identify the biggest constraint holding your startup back
Assess readiness before raising capital or quitting your job
Prepare for accelerators and incubator applications
Diagnose why your startup isn't gaining traction
Prioritize what to fix instead of guessing next steps
Compare multiple startup ideas objectively
Track your progress as your startup evolves
Strengthen your pitch by identifying weak areas
Standardize startup evaluation for advisors and programs
Baseline and track an entire accelerator or university cohort
Give mentors a shared diagnostic before the first session
