Built from real failures. Designed to prevent yours.
Two products. One thesis: the patterns that destroy companies are the patterns that destroy business ideas. We've turned both into machine-readable signals — one for data buyers, one for founders.
Watch what fails
We've spent years cataloguing the operational signatures that precede UK corporate distress, and the cognitive signatures that precede founder regret. The patterns are surprisingly similar — and surprisingly recurring.
Encode the patterns
41 stability checks for every iXBRL filing on Companies House. Six dimensions for every business idea. Same methodology: observe the failure, name it, then look for it everywhere it might recur.
Surface it before it's too late
For data buyers, the patterns become a sub-5-minute signal feed wired into your stack. For founders, they become a free 5-minute self-assessment. Either way — you see the failure mode before it owns you.
Two products. Same epistemology.
The Pulse is the production data feed buyers wire into procurement, M&A and quant stacks. The Framework is the free idea-scoring tool that started it all. They share an underlying belief: failure leaves traces, and traces are measurable.
The Stability Engine
Every UK iXBRL filing — ~340,000 a day — runs through 41 named stability checks. Each check is benchmarked against the SIC peer set and auditable back to the source filing reference. Six of the most-used signals below.
Current Ratio Trend
Year-on-year movement in current assets / current liabilities. A falling ratio is the single most reliable cliff-edge tell — most defaults show -15% or worse twelve months out. Tracked against the SIC peer-set median so we flag actual decay, not industry-wide compression.
Staff-Cost Ratio
Staff costs as a share of turnover, watched for sudden cliffs. A 15%+ headcount cut almost always means the operations team know something the credit bureaus don't — service-delivery failures usually follow inside two quarters.
Debt-to-Equity Spike
Sudden D/E expansion — typically >200% YoY — is a covenant-stress signal. Combined with a falling current ratio, it's a textbook pre-administration footprint. Auditable to the exact iXBRL tags driving the calculation.
Threshold Crossings
The £10.2M turnover line, £5.1M balance-sheet line and 50-employee line each flip a company between Small / Medium reporting regimes. Each crossing is a same-day signal — and a massive trigger for legal, audit and software upsell.
Director Resignation Cluster
Three or more director resignations inside 90 days, weighted by tenure. Catches the classic "rats leaving the ship" pattern weeks before it shows up in the credit file. Cross-referenced against PSC filings for ownership shifts.
Cash-Burn Runway
Net cash position divided by trailing 12-month operating loss. Any company below 12 months of runway gets flagged; below 6 months gets escalated. Particularly useful for vendor-risk teams watching loss-making Tier-1 suppliers.
From filing to signal — under four minutes
We sit on the Companies House submission stream. The moment iXBRL lands, the parser, the 41 checks and the signal taxonomy run in sequence — each step auditable, each output traceable to the filing reference.
Ingest iXBRL
Direct off the Companies House submission stream. ~14k–22k filings/day, no re-licensed extracts.
Extract ratios
Pull the buried tags most credit bureaus throw away — staff costs, current ratio, debt/equity, headcount.
Run 41 checks
Each ratio benchmarked against the SIC peer set. Threshold crossings and trend breaks auto-named.
Deliver signal
JSON, CSV or webhook. Every record cites the originating Companies House filing reference.
Our Pattern-Dimension Framework
Every idea is evaluated across six dimensions. These aren't random metrics — they're the factors that consistently separate ideas that succeed from ideas that stall. Each dimension is scored independently, and the combination tells the real story.
Market Demand
Is there real, measurable demand for what you're building? We look for evidence that people want this — not just that you think they should. Search volume, existing spending, waitlists, pre-orders, or clear pain points that people are actively trying to solve. Ideas built on assumed demand are the number one reason businesses fail within their first two years.
Differentiation
What makes your idea different from what already exists? If the answer is "nothing much", that's a problem we'll flag early. We assess whether your angle is genuinely unique — a different audience, a better delivery mechanism, a pricing model that changes the economics, or technology that wasn't available before. "We'll do it better" isn't differentiation. Specificity is.
Feasibility
Can this actually be built with the resources, technology, and timeline you have? We evaluate technical complexity, regulatory barriers, capital requirements, and operational dependencies. A brilliant idea that needs five years and ten million pounds to reach market is a fundamentally different proposition from one that can launch in three months with a small team.
Revenue Model
How will this make money? We assess whether your monetisation strategy is realistic, sustainable, and aligned with your market. Subscription, transactional, advertising, freemium — each model has trade-offs. We look at willingness to pay, unit economics, and whether the revenue model matches how your customers actually behave and spend.
Leadership Fit
Are you the right person to build this? Your skills, experience, network, and circumstances matter as much as the idea itself. A fintech idea from someone with a decade in banking scores differently from the same idea pitched by someone with no financial services experience. We're not gatekeeping — we're helping you see where your gaps are so you can fill them.
Timing
Is now the right moment? Too early is just as dangerous as too late. We look at market readiness, regulatory shifts, technology adoption curves, and competitive timing. Many great ideas failed simply because they launched before the market was ready — or after a competitor had already locked it up. Timing isn't luck; it's a dimension you can evaluate.
How Dimensions Interact
No single dimension tells the full story. A high market demand score means nothing if feasibility is low. Here's how two real-world examples compare across all six dimensions.
Pursue: AI Invoice Scanner
Strong across all six dimensions — clear demand from small businesses, unique OCR approach, technically feasible with current APIs, SaaS pricing model, founder with accounting background, and perfect timing as Making Tax Digital rolls out.
Pivot: Local Meal-Kit Delivery
Mixed signals — moderate demand, weak differentiation versus established players, capital-intensive feasibility, fragile unit economics, and timing that's already crowded. The Framework recommends a Pivot, not an Archive — there's a smaller, sharper version worth exploring.
How Ideas Distribute
Roughly a third of ideas we score earn a Pursue. The biggest band — Pivot — is where most of the value is added: the idea isn't dead, it just isn't this idea yet.
Example Assessment Output
Here's what a real assessment looks like — a Pivot-scored meal-kit idea.
Local Meal-Kit Delivery
Subscription boxes sourced from local farms, delivered weekly to urban areas.
We Show You Both Sides
Every assessment highlights where you're strong and where you need work.
Strengths Identified
Dimensions where your idea scores above 70% are called out as strengths with specific reasons why they work.
Weaknesses Flagged
Low-scoring dimensions get honest explanations of what's missing and concrete suggestions for improvement.
Why AI?
Most people ask friends and family about their ideas. Friends are kind. Family is supportive. Neither is honest. Most data buyers ask credit bureaus about their suppliers. Bureaus are slow. Bureaus aggregate. Neither is fresh.
The same machine that scores ideas across six dimensions parses 340,000 iXBRL filings a day looking for stability signals. Both jobs require the same thing: a system that doesn't have feelings to spare and doesn't have a stake in the outcome.
It just looks at the data, applies the framework, and gives you a straight answer. That's what makes it useful — whether you're stress-testing an idea or stress-testing a vendor.
- No emotional attachment to your idea — or your supplier
- Consistent framework, applied identically every time
- Available instantly — no booking, no quarterly refresh
- Brutally honest, but never cruel
- Built from real successes and real failures
Want to go deeper?
Two routes in. Buyers get a sample feed cut to their watchlist within a day. Founders get an instant idea score, no sign-up.