How AltF Ideas scores startup ideas — the full methodology

The six signals

The six signals and their weights
Signal	Weight	What it measures
Demand	22%	Search trend, community pain frequency, and money already being spent on the problem.
Moat	20%	Defensibility from a data loop, workflow lock-in, regulation, or distribution.
Monetisation	18%	Contract value against willingness to pay and the shape of retention.
Feasibility	16%	How small the first shippable version can be, and how much technical risk it carries.
Timing	14%	Whether something changed recently that makes this possible or urgent now.
Open field	10%	How much room is left — high means incumbents have not covered this properly.

Open field is deliberately the inverse of crowding: a high score means incumbents have not covered the workflow properly. It carries the smallest weight because an empty market is often empty for a reason.

Why the parts always add up

The composite is calculated as AOS = Σ(signal × weight) / Σ(weight) and nothing else. There is no hidden adjustment layer, no editorial override, and no secondary curve applied after the fact. If you add up the six numbers shown on any idea page with the weights above, you will get the score printed in the ring.

This constraint matters more than it looks. The moment a composite stops matching its visible components, a transparent score becomes a black box with extra steps.

How signals are calibrated

Raw signal values are derived from base rates attached to each axis of an idea — the industry, the buyer, the job, the technical mechanism, the market wedge, and the business model. Left raw, those values cluster tightly around their axis means, which would make almost every idea look the same.

Each signal is therefore mapped onto its own percentile curve across the whole corpus, spreading it over a 21–97 range with a mild S-curve that keeps a realistic centre mass while still populating both tails. A signal score is best read as how this idea compares to the other 117,264, not as an absolute measurement of the world.

Tiers

Tier thresholds and corpus distribution
Tier	AOS	Ideas	Share
S	78+	1,252	1.1%
A	70–77	10,884	9.3%
B	59–69	48,842	41.7%
C	under 59	56,286	48.0%

Thresholds are anchored to percentiles rather than chosen by feel, because the useful question is not “is 71 a good score” but “how does this rank against the alternatives”. The median idea scores 59; the highest in the corpus currently scores 87.

Badges

Badges such as Underserved or Weekend build are computed from the score components, never written by hand. A badge is a readable shorthand for a threshold that has already been met — it cannot claim something the numbers do not support.

What this score does not tell you

Whether you specifically should build it. Founder-market fit dominates outcomes and is not knowable from an idea.
Whether the market figures are current. They are order-of-magnitude base rates for comparison, not audited research.
Whether anyone will buy. Only conversations with buyers answer that, which is why every dossier ends with a step that involves talking to eight of them.
Whether it is already being built. A high open-field score means we found no obvious incumbent, not that none exists.
How hard the last 20% is. Every dossier names a hardest part, and it is usually the honest answer to this question.

Reproducibility

The corpus is generated deterministically. Every value that looks random is a hash of the idea’s own structural fingerprint, so regenerating from the same taxonomy produces byte-identical output. Two people reading the same idea page a month apart see the same score, and any change to a score is traceable to a change in the published taxonomy rather than to drift.

117,264
Ideas scored: 61
Industries: 12,000
Full dossiers: 40
Jobs mapped: 14
Mechanisms: 12
Business models

Questions

How is the AltF Opportunity Score calculated?

The AOS is the weighted mean of six signals: demand (22%), moat (20%), monetisation (18%), feasibility (16%), timing (14%) and open field (10%). Each signal is scored 0-100. The composite is always the plain weighted average of the six displayed values, so the parts always add up to the whole.

What does a good opportunity score look like?

Tiers are anchored to percentiles within the corpus rather than set as absolute grades. Tier S is roughly the top 1% (AOS 78+), tier A the top 10% (70+), tier B the top half (59+), and tier C the remainder. The median idea in the corpus scores 59.

Can I change the weights?

Yes. The weights are exposed on the home page and can be re-set to five presets or dragged individually. A solo developer should weight feasibility far higher than a venture-backed team would, and the ranking changes accordingly.

Are the scores predictions?

No. They are a ranking device for comparing ideas against each other, not a forecast of whether a specific business will succeed. Execution, timing within a market, and founder fit dominate real outcomes and none of them are knowable from an idea alone.

Where do the market figures come from?

Market size and growth rates are derived from published industry base rates attached to each of the 61 verticals, then adjusted for the specific job and buyer. They are order-of-magnitude estimates for comparison, not audited figures, and should be verified before any funding or hiring decision.

Citing this page

AltF Ideas (2026). How AltF Ideas scores startup ideas. AltFTool. Retrieved from https://www.altftool.com/ideas/learn/scoring-methodology

Corpus snapshot: 117,264 ideas across 61 industries, AOS range 31–87, median 59. Collections currently span 12 computed shortlists.