SHIPSCORE
An AI-powered startup idea scorer — from product strategy and scoring logic to interface and deployment, turning uncertain ideas into ranked business decisions.
ORGANIZATION
INDEPENDENT PRODUCT
PERIOD
2025
ROLE
PRODUCT STRATEGY · SCORING LOGIC · UI · DEPLOYMENT — SOLO
STACK
REACT · CLAUDE API · NETLIFY
01 — THE BRIEF
Builders don't lack ideas — they lack an honest way to rank them. Gut feel is biased, friends are polite, and the cost of picking wrong is months of wasted build time.
ShipScore puts an idea through structured AI evaluation and returns a score a founder can compare and act on — the whole product designed, built, and shipped by one engineer.
02 — OPERATING CONSTRAINTS
- An AI opinion is worthless if it's vague — scoring had to be structured and comparable across ideas.
- Solo build: product strategy, scoring logic, UI, and deployment all one pair of hands.
- Ship fast and cheap: a product experiment, not an infrastructure project.
03 — SYSTEM STRUCTURE
REACT INTERFACE
Idea in, verdict out — the scoring flow kept simple enough to use in a coffee break.
SCORING LOGIC
Structured evaluation criteria — the product's real IP — driving consistent, comparable scores.
CLAUDE API
The AI evaluator, constrained by the scoring rubric rather than free-styling opinions.
NETLIFY DEPLOYMENT
Zero-ops hosting so the experiment could ship and iterate immediately.
04 — KEY DECISIONS
DECISION 01
A rubric, not a chatbot
Free-form LLM feedback flatters and drifts. Fixed scoring criteria make two ideas comparable — which is the entire point of scoring.
DECISION 02
Own the whole loop
Strategy, logic, UI, deployment by one person means the product's thesis stays coherent from prompt to pixel.
DECISION 03
Deploy on zero-ops infrastructure
Netlify let the product exist in the world the day it worked — evidence beats a local demo.
05 — OUTCOME
Uncertain ideas became ranked business decisions.
- · Second AI product in the file alongside NXRiseUp — different provider (Claude vs Gemini), same discipline: AI constrained by structure.
CROSS-EXAMINATION
The full walkthrough — code, schema, trade-offs — happens live. Fifteen minutes, no slides.
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