Welcome to the inaugural G/Score™ post here on The Guidewire. As we mentioned earlier in the week, the G/Score is essentially Guidewire Group’s brain, codified. We’ve taken 20 years and 20,000 startup interviews and molded them into a transparent, quantifiable rating system for young companies. Our scorecards make it easy for startups to identify areas of strength and weakness, and for investors and assessors to establish much-needed evaluation benchmarks.
In time, we hope the G/Score will be adopted by any organization charged with assessing and monitoring startup potential. For our part, we’ll post scorecards on the companies we meet directly and which we think represent leadership and/or disruption in key market sectors.
As you might imagine, these posted scorecards are merely the tip of the iceberg for the G/Score. We plan to integrate it into many different aspects of our services for startups. We’ll be working with partners around the world, initially through the search for the 100 most promising global startups, to make G/Score the global standard for evaluating the business viability of startups.
But at the simplest level, we want to use it to tell our readers about the companies we’re meeting. So without further ado, you’ll find below an anecdotal summary of Kampyle, a startup working in feedback analytics, and its accompanying scorecard. We’d love to hear your comments, questions, and suggestions on the scorecard’s design, so ping us – info [at] guidewiregroup.com – and let us know what you think.
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Kampyle specializes in feedback analytics, giving brands deeper insight into specific behaviors of its users. It is a solid company with a respectable user base, a sharp team, and a well-built product that is needed by virtually every online brand today.
Feedback analytics, however, can be a bit dry; when your stock-in-trade is charts and graphs, you’re not going to be running ads during the Superbowl. Kampyle needs to recognize and adjust, if only slightly, for that fact. Though data is about as hot a topic as one can find in 2010, the company needs a better handle on presenting the large amount of stats it’s throwing at its customers. It’s simply too much for a person to realistically consume.
Beyond that, the company seems to be firing on all cylinders. It has impressive customer wins and partnerships, with a vast potential market ahead of it. In short, Kampyle transforms numbers into usable, readable, employable analytics – and that’s something today’s major brands will pay a lot for.
**Update – Kampyle has alerted me to a lower-cost package for “startups, non-profits and personal blogs” that includes limited features for $49/month.
See their site for more info.
Has the G/Score framework been evaluated against actual outcomes to determine how well it predicts the success/failure of early stage companies?
If so – has any sensitivity analysis been done to evaluate the relative impact of each category?
For example: in general, what does the G/Score rate as more important for success – a “strong” product, or a “strong” management team?
Intuitively one might say “both” but this is clearly not true and rarely achievable. As a practical matter, investors need to understand the “threshold values” (minimum score on each category necessary to have a reasonable chance at success)
If not – isn’t really just a quantified set of opinions rather than a prescriptive tool?
Excellent questions, Chris, and ones that merit a separate blog post. Look for a post from Chris Shipley, upon whose experience the G/Score methodology is largely based, early next week.
[...] then, we got this question on our blog: “Has the G/Score framework been evaluated against actual outcomes to determine [...]
I’ve been intrigued by your G-Score system and, using your outlines and trying to remain objective, roughly ran my business plan through it. Since it is still very much in its fund raising state, I wanted to identify where our weakest areas were in order to try and improve on these before presenting to VC’s.
Through the available options I was indeed able to identify these weak areas and am working on improving these, so that when we do go in front of potential VC’s we can present a more complete package, with hopefully a higher chance of actually getting through to a second round.
I realize it is not the same as actually having your company running these, but since there is no budget, this is for the time being the only option. I do have every intention of using your company should we get past round one.
thank you.
G/Score deserves to be the new standard. I am very much in fond of this. Start-ups are usually extremely viable and need something like G/Score.
This is very interesting indeed, though I am hesitant to think that scorecards can be assigned to startups that can contain unknown numbers of variables. I really wonder how accurate it could possibly be. An exceptional idea, nonetheless!
Why isn’t G/Score isn’t the standart yet? Even with that many variables, I think this is a accurate form of measuing startups
G/Score deserves to be the new standard. I am very much in fond of this. Start-ups are usually extremely viable and need something like G/Score.
Kampyle specializes in feedback analytics, giving brands deeper insight into specific behaviors of its users. It is a solid company with a respectable user base, a sharp team, and a well-built product that is needed by virtually every online brand today.
isn’t really just a quantified set of opinions rather than a prescriptive tool?
Love the idea of the GScore. As you say, its essentially Guidewire Group’s brain, codified.
Love it.
Ryan