Guide
Twelve fields before a public sentence
This is the issuer operating map. Fill it or do not launch.
Entity. Founders. Product URL. Counsel. Instrument. Pathway. Geographies. Audience. Claims. Providers. What the date means. Budget in sterling. Twelve. Not twenty. Not three. Teams that cannot fill them are not “early”; they are not yet an issuer.
Harbor Labs had a Swiss entity and a handsome site. Counsel was “in conversation.” Pathway was “waiting on Reg CA.” Budget was “token allocation for the pad.” We scored them, then declined the sale. The product was real. The map was a mood. Real product plus empty map is still an empty map.
Guide
What counts as product proof
A counterparty will ask for a URL in the first ten minutes. Have one.
A live application. A permissioned testnet with a seed reviewer. A pilot letter from a named (even if redacted) customer. An administrator engagement. A warehouse that has written an event. These are proof. A Figma, a whitepaper, and a waitlist of Twitter handles are not.
If the product is infrastructure, the proof is a job someone already pays for — routing, NAV, title, netting — plus evidence that a named buyer exists or is in a real conversation. “We will tokenise X” is a future. Futures are classified as hopes until a customer appears.
Guide
Founders who can be found
Anonymous teams do not conduct regulated offerings. They conduct rumours.
A regulated event has a person who can be sued, called, and asked a question on a recorded line. If the brand is a handle, the offering is not ready. If the CEO will not be named on the file, the file is not ready. If the technical founder is a contractor in a jurisdiction you will not disclose, write that down — it is a fact, and facts can be managed. Hiding it is the problem.
Guide
How we inventory — and what “empty” does
Empty is not a moral failure. It is a publishing rule.
On intake we mark each field: present, partial, absent. Present means a document or URL. Partial means a conversation. Absent means we will not publish a sentence that needs that field. Partial is not present. “Counsel in conversation” is absent. “LOI incoming” is absent. “Date TBC” is absent.
The board you see — 375 companies — is the set that cleared enough of this map to be listed as a file. 570 did not. Some of those 570 had better logos. The map does not care.