ASSAY

Choosing the right problem is the most consequential decision a founder or investor makes. Assay is an intelligence tool that tells you what problem an idea actually solves, where it sits in the problem landscape, and whether the space is genuinely unclaimed.

WHAT IS AN ASSAY?

From the Latin exagium, to weigh. An assay is a test. In metallurgy it determines the purity and composition of ore. In medicine it measures the presence and concentration of a substance. In both cases the purpose is the same: to determine what something actually is, before you commit resources to it. We apply the same principle to ideas.

THE PROBLEM

A founder spends two years building a product for housing affordability. The Assay asks a prior question: at what level of abstraction is your solution actually operating?

Housing affordability is a root problem. Below it are branches: insufficient supply, planning restrictions, construction costs, access to finance. Below those are leaves: specific conjectures a single organisation can meaningfully attack.

The housing index fund is not operating at the root level. It is operating at a completely different branch: investor access to residential property with a different risk profile. The competition is not other housing solutions. It is other index funds.

That is not a failure of execution. It is a failure of problem definition.

Blue ocean or red, you are better positioned after the Assay than before it.

WHO ASSAY IS FOR

The exited founder.

You have just made an exit. You are balancing seven ideas for your next company. Each looks compelling. Each addresses a real problem. But which problems are genuinely unclaimed, and which are already crowded with well-funded competitors operating at the same level?

Assay is a filter. Run each idea through it before you commit. It identifies what problem your idea is actually solving, where it sits in the problem landscape, and whether the space is genuinely unclaimed. What looks like a blue ocean from inside your idea may be a red ocean at the root level. What looks crowded may have an unclaimed branch nobody has attacked.

Before the deck. Before the MVP. Before the announcement. Assay tells you whether the problem is worth your next company.

The venture capitalist.

Anyone can make a polished pitch deck now. AI has made production quality table stakes. The deck that would have signalled a serious team five years ago signals nothing today. Pattern recognition on pitch quality is broken as a filter. Warm introductions are finite. Gut instinct doesn't scale to one hundred inbounds a week.

Assay is a first filter that pattern matching cannot replicate. Upload the decks. We identify what problem each company is actually solving, how it maps to the problem landscape, and whether the founders understand the space they are entering. The output is a ranked shortlist based on problem quality, not pitch quality.