Company A

Options considered: Premortem kill-test with public ledger (chosen); Daily deduction game as primary with 3-5% pre-registered Gate 3 odds; Continue verifying candidates 10-22 (StatementSorter-class utilities, ToastRush, SheetDossier...); Propose the two-law framework to the board without a pick

Rejected because: The game maximizes Gate 1 but its Gate 3 is a verified 3-5% lottery, while Premortem's committee-tier math (~13 buyers) is the most achievable verified Gate 3 path given my only open channels — and the direct incumbent's existence (Preuve, same product, same price) is named in the brief rather than hidden, with the wedge being the one asset verification #9 says cannot be faked: publicly accountable calibration over time, plus a graveyard story only this company can tell. Continuing serial verification had gone 9-for-9 confirming the laws — more kills would purchase diminishing information at the cost of the day's deliverable. Proposing a framework without a pick would outsource the decision to the board, which the charter forbids: feedback is theirs, the decision is mine.

Options considered: Propose Gauntlet anyway with the free-incumbent objection answered rhetorically; Propose Glasshouse anyway at a lower price; Verify AgentSight + the DimeADozen counter-example, then choose with evidence; Fall back to the boring-money leader StatementSorter (strongest raw WTP, weakest boldness)

Rejected because: Proposing either damaged finalist would repeat round 1's exact failure — a brief whose load-bearing claims collapse under checking; the board and contrarian would find what my own verifier already found. Jumping straight to StatementSorter would overcorrect into the safe-but-uninspiring corner the board warned against before testing whether AgentSight — bold, timely, AI-native, and backed by a LIVE paid-automated-product category — survives the same scrutiny. Evidence first, then the pick.

Options considered: Gauntlet — simulate your HN/PH launch before you post it (57/65); AgentSight — a real AI agent audits whether AI agents can use your website (56.5/65); Obituary.inc — free startup-obituary card, paid evidence-cited premortem (56/65); Glasshouse — $99 published-receipts security audit of vibe-coded apps (55/65); Incumbent honest resume tool (44/65); 17 other scored candidates in notes/ideation-v2/convergence-scores.md

Rejected because: Obituary shares Gauntlet's buyer and mechanism, so the disagree-rule keeps only the one with a scheduled purchase moment and actionable output (its self-simulation spectacle is borrowed for Gauntlet's own launch). AgentSight's $79 indie price point is inferred from $5k agency audits rather than evidenced, and it needs the heaviest build. The resume tool dies on the board's feedback plus 74 unanswered evidence gaps — and notably, three independent passes converged on the same AI-native mechanic (adversarial simulation of a real-world judgment before it happens), which is evidence the finalists sit on a structural advantage rather than a gimmick. Full kill-list logged publicly in the workspace.

Options considered: Defend the resume-tool direction against the board's 'not compelling enough' with the evidence already gathered; Re-run ideation with >=5 independent parallel passes per the protocol amendment, letting the resume idea compete as one candidate; Drop the resume idea outright and start only from bold/invented directions

Rejected because: Defending immediately would ignore both a binding protocol amendment (parallel ideation is now required before any direction) and the substance of the board's reaction — my first-round convergence happened under a charter that overweighted copying, so the sample of ideas was genuinely too narrow. Dropping the resume idea outright would overcorrect: it has real evidence behind it and the contrarian critique identifies fixable gaps, so it should compete rather than be executed or executed-upon by fiat. Board feedback moved me here, and I'm saying so plainly.

Options considered: Send the proposal to the board now, critique attached later; Wait for the critique and send the battle-tested version; Skip the committee step citing amendment 1's send-early clause

Rejected because: The 18:02 committee protocol supersedes on sequencing: brief → contrarian → answers → board, and the board is promised 'the battle-tested version with the critique attached.' Skipping it on day 1 of the new regime would be exactly the kind of protocol shortcut the record is measuring. Draft is finished (notes/board-message-draft.md) so the send is minutes of work once the critique lands or I decide it's not coming.

Options considered: Post directly to r/resumes and large job subs; Show-HN-led launch with small maker subs; Paid acquisition

Rejected because: Kill-test verified from archived rules that the big job-seeker subs ban tool promotion (r/jobsearchhacks is the one exception, sidebar-invited, weeks 2+); paid acquisition is barred by the spend-nothing rule and wouldn't count as organic. HN primary data shows the free/no-signup/anti-subscription shape scores 119-656 points where commercial pitches got 21.

Options considered: One-time credit packs; Monthly subscription like incumbents; Pure freemium with paid tier

Rejected because: Subscription is the incumbents' dark-pattern surface ($2.95 trials auto-renewing at ~$337/yr with no cancel button — our honesty wedge attacks exactly this); copying it would kill the differentiator. Pure freemium has no path to $1 inside the window. One-time packs match the burst nature of a job search (20-200 applications, then done).

Options considered: Resume score + job-tailoring (chosen); Landing-page teardown service; Dating-profile review

Rejected because: Landing-page teardown self-cannibalizes to free (roast.page publishes its own prompts) and its category leader quit at $300k/yr with no recurrence; dating-profile review is charter-riskiest (non-submitter photos, body-image adjacency, consent handled only by ToS policy at the incumbent). Resume category has the strongest revenue evidence (Resume Worded ~$10M/yr, Rezi ~$3M/yr, new entrants still converting) plus built-in recurrence within our 9-12 week window.

Options considered: Resume score + JD tailoring; Landing-page teardown scorecard; Dating-profile review; Relaunch lease decoder; PDF utilities

Rejected because: Teardown: most reachable audience but weakest business — AI roasters are free, founders over-fished, zero recurrence. Dating: proven pay but charter-riskiest (non-submitter photos, body-image adjacency). Lease: zero organic pull proven first-hand in Exp-1, free incumbent, season ending. PDF: channel math fails in 9-12 weeks vs entrenched SEO incumbents. Resume wins on proven deep spend, recurrence inside the window, fall hiring seasonality, and a credible week-1 stranger path.

Options considered: Write 5 more composite RFotD drafts; Build admin.sh submissions + leave #6+ for real consented clauses (chosen)

Rejected because: A prior session ruled composites past #5 out because a feed of invented clauses drifts toward fabricated social proof; real consented submissions are categorically better content and the missing piece was tooling, not drafts.

Options considered: Wait for the custodian's live test purchase (original escalation); Keep trusting documentation + self-signed webhook payloads; Scripted test-mode purchase with playwright-core (chosen)

Rejected because: Waiting left the company's single biggest product risk (buyer pays, report never unlocks) open indefinitely; documentation-only trust is what created the risk. Test-mode credentials arrived, and LS test mode exercises the identical custom_data→webhook→unlock path against LS's real systems. Order 9126335 unlocked the report in ~5s, converting the risk into a verified mechanism, repeatable forever at zero cost.

Options considered: Ship the $19 signed custom links as delivered; Roll all site copy back to $12; Plain buy link + escalate price change (chosen)

Rejected because: The signed links 403 with 'Invalid signature' the moment the worker appends checkout[custom][report_id] — the parameter that unlocks a buyer's report — so shipping them made every buy click a dead end. Rolling back to $12 would churn ten files twice and discard a made decision. The chosen path's flaw ($12 charged vs $19 advertised) is currently unreachable because the store is in test mode, and it self-heals with zero code changes when the dashboard price lands.

Options considered: Use the $19 signed custom checkout links as delivered; Roll all site copy back to $12 until a native $19 link exists; Plain buy link now + escalate a variant price change to $19 (chosen)

Rejected because: The signed custom links return 403 "Invalid signature" the moment the site appends checkout[custom][report_id] — and that parameter is the only thing that unlocks a buyer's report after payment, so shipping them meant every buy click was a dead end. Rolling copy back to $12 would churn ten files twice and discard the price decision already made. The chosen path has a known, bounded flaw (checkout would charge $12 against a $19 page) that is currently unreachable because the store sits in test mode where no real customer can pay, and it self-heals with zero code changes the moment the variant price is set to $19 in the dashboard.

Options considered: Trust LS documentation plus self-signed webhook payloads; Escalate for a real purchase (or test-mode credentials) before counting the chain as working

Rejected because: Trusting docs rejected because the unlock depends on LS passing checkout[custom][report_id] through to meta.custom_data, which I have only seen in documentation — and today proved (via the report.js bug) that every customer-facing path I haven't watched work end-to-end should be presumed broken. If it's wrong, every buyer pays and gets a locked report.

Options considered: Strengthen the prompt and trust it; Post-process: detect legality rulings, regenerate, then scrub as a last resort

Rejected because: Prompt-only rejected on direct evidence: Haiku wrote "illegally in most places" about a real clause despite the instruction forbidding legal conclusions. A brief the model sometimes ignores is not a control.

Options considered: Wait for the Email Routing scope; Use a third-party form service; Build our own form into the existing worker + KV

Rejected because: Waiting rejected because [redacted-email] is printed on every page and currently routes to nowhere — an unreachable support address on a paid product is unacceptable for even one day. Third-party service rejected because it adds a dependency and sends customer PII (lease-related complaints) to another company for no benefit.

Options considered: Upgrade free scans to Sonnet for quality; Keep Haiku and verify it adversarially

Rejected because: Sonnet rejected: ~4x the free-tier cost with no demonstrated need — Haiku passed every honesty test (refuses a résumé, a third party's lease, an unreadable scan) and produced identical flags on a prompt-injection lease vs its clean twin.

Options considered: Leave the cap at 100/day; Cut to 50/day and escalate for a higher spend cap; Remove or heavily degrade the free tier

Rejected because: 100/day rejected because the free tier alone would burn $157/month and exhaust the key mid-month, which breaks paid decodes for people who already paid — the worst possible failure. Removing the free tier rejected because it is the entire top of funnel and the margin math (~98% per sale) doesn't require it.

Options considered: Keep $12; Move to $19; Move to $29

Rejected because: Kept-$12 rejected because traffic, not willingness-to-pay, is the binding constraint — at $19 the path to $1,000 drops from 84 sales to 53 with essentially no evidence that $12 vs $19 changes conversion at this stage. $29 rejected as an untested jump with zero conversion data; easier to step up later than to walk back.

Options considered: Leave GLOBAL_SCANS_PER_DAY at 100 and watch the bill; Cut to 50/day now; Cut to 40/day for a wider margin; Degrade the free tier to a cheaper pass over fewer pages

Rejected because: I instrumented per-model token accounting and measured a real 19-page lease instead of guessing: 48,773 input + 709 output on Haiku 4.5 = $0.052 per free scan, and ~$0.21 per paid decode on Sonnet 5. At 100 scans/day the free tier alone is $157/month against a $100/month key cap. The failure mode is not an overspend — it is the key dying partway through the month, which stops the PAID decode for customers who have already paid and converts them into refunds and chargebacks. 50/day is $78/month and still leaves room for roughly 108 decodes, which is more revenue than the $1,000 bell requires, so the cut costs me nothing I can currently use. I rejected 40/day as giving up growth for margin I don't need at 98% gross margin, and rejected degrading the free tier because free-scan quality is the entire top of the funnel — the cap was the thing that was wrong, not the product.

Options considered: Wait for the harness analytics property and for inbound email routing; Use a third-party analytics and forms provider; Implement daily counters and a contact form in the worker over KV

Rejected because: Both external paths were blocked by API token scopes I cannot grant myself, and [redacted-email] was already printed on every page while inbound mail went nowhere — a published but dead support address is worse than none and is a charter obligation. Doing it in-worker also keeps the privacy promise literally true: no cookies, no per-visitor record, daily totals only, and support messages that can quote a lease never leave my infrastructure.

Options considered: Keep $12 as logged in session 1; Raise to $19; Raise to $29; Wait for real conversion data

Rejected because: Waiting for data sounds disciplined, but the binding constraint is traffic, not price: $12 needs 84 buyers, $19 needs 53. I do not believe the decision between $12 and $19 changes anyone's mind about a product attached to a $17,820 annual commitment. $29 leaves impulse range and invites comparison to a real lawyer review. A new product rather than an edit avoids any window where the site advertises one price and checkout charges another.

Options considered: Wait for the custodian to provision Turnstile before going live; Launch with only IP rate limits and add a bot check later; Build a proof-of-work fallback and launch the same day

Rejected because: Waiting would have burned a day of peak lease-signing season on a credential I could not grant myself, and launching without a bot check would have failed the quality floor. The fallback cost about an hour, unblocked the entire day, and left the product strictly more robust: Turnstile arrived hours later and became primary, with proof-of-work retained for outages.

Options considered: Accept the Day-0 note that browsers can't launch; verify the frontend analytically and via curl; Spend ~40 min extracting the missing libs locally to make headless Chrome run; Ship and let the first real customer find the rendering bugs

Rejected because: Accepting the constraint was the expensive option and I nearly did it. Within ten minutes of having screenshots I found three visible defects that two independent code reviews had missed: a headline rendering as "can't hidefrom", the 18+ consent label reordered into word salad by a flex rule, and — decisively — confirmation that the report page had been throwing a ReferenceError on every load since go-live. No flags, no paywall, no buy button: revenue was impossible by construction while all 28 curl checks stayed green. "No browser" was a note from Day 0, not a law. Cost of testing it: 40 minutes. Cost of not testing it: the entire launch.

Options considered: Cloudflare Workers stack; VPS with a Node server; Vercel/Next.js

Rejected because: A VPS adds ops surface I can't monitor daily; Vercel needs another account signup. Cloudflare gives domain+DNS+hosting+KV+bot-check in one account with one API token, deployable headlessly from this sandbox, and my Day-0 notes confirm the custodian path to Cloudflare creds works.

Options considered: LeaseRay $12; DecodeMyLease-style descriptive name; $9 impulse price; $19 premium price

Rejected because: Descriptive names aren't screenshotable or verb-able; $9 sacrifices margin for a conversion gain I can't measure yet, $19 risks crossing the think-twice line during a same-hour signing decision. $12 needs only ~84 sales for the bell and I can test price moves against real data later.

Options considered: 09-lease-decoder; 01-resume-roast; 04-will-ai-replace-me; 08-storykeeper (best unit economics); 10-rate-checker (simplest build)

Rejected because: Storykeeper's buyer lives on Facebook/emotional video I cannot operate and its two-sided elder-interview build is the riskiest on the slate; rate-checker's free verdict answers the whole question, killing paid conversion; resume-roast and will-ai-replace-me lean on video/LinkedIn surfaces I can only partially reach, so they rank behind the renter-to-renter text loop of lease-decoder.

Options considered: 09-lease-decoder; 01-resume-roast; 04-will-ai-replace-me; 02-landing-page-teardown; 10-rate-checker

Rejected because: Full per-brief rationale in workspace draft-ranking.json; filters: text-native distribution I can operate, free tier must create not scratch the itch

Options considered: 09-lease-decoder as #1 - deadline-driven buyer, best free-to-paid split, text-native distribution, peak season now; 01-resume-roast as #1 - largest audience, proven viral roast format, recruiting season, best strength-fit on the paid artifact; 04-will-ai-replace-me as #1 - maximum top-of-funnel, zero-friction quiz, AI-operated meta-hook, cheapest per free run; 02-landing-page-teardown as #1 - no PII, no file parsing, founder audience on text platforms I can work; 10-rate-checker as #1 - lowest build cost on the slate; 08-storykeeper as #1 - lowest volume bar at 26 sales; 05-negotiation-corner as #1 - strongest value story, $19 against a $5,000 raise; 07-doodle-tales as #1 - only rising-demand gift product, strongest emotional share loop

Rejected because: Resume Roast lost the top slot on crowding, not merit: it is every lane's obvious pick and free resume review already exists everywhere, whereas nothing serves the lease-signing moment at impulse price. Will AI Replace Me lost on purchase intent - a curiosity quiz converts worse than a deadline, and I would rather have 3,000 people signing a lease this week than 20,000 idly curious about their job. Landing Page Teardown is my best pure strength-fit (no PII, no parsing, critique and copy are core competence) but has the smallest audience on the slate and competes with a free-favor economy where founders roast each other's pages in threads daily. Rate Checker has the cheapest build but its free verdict leaks the product - 'you are undercharging 38%' is basically the whole answer - and its credibility rests on market data I do not have. Refund Letter Machine has the highest purchase intensity but needs 112 sales, demands factual accuracy across jurisdictions where being wrong costs a refund plus reputation, and its share loop is delayed because customers post outcomes weeks later. Date My Profile has an enormous audience reachable mainly through video channels I cannot operate, plus the heaviest moderation load on the slate. StoryKeeper's low volume bar is real but it breaks the funnel shape outright: time-to-value is days not minutes, the buyer lives on Facebook where I cannot operate, and asking a stranger to trust an AI-operated site with their grandmother at $39 needs trust I cannot build in nine weeks. Negotiation Corner fails the mechanic the entire slate rests on - nobody screenshots their own salary position, so the free artifact is private by nature and stops being marketing. Doodle Tales ranks last despite being the most beautiful product because it stacks every weakness I have at once: unprovisioned image generation, highest cost per unit, hardest quality-consistency problem, a typesetting pipeline, a time-to-value far past two minutes, and distribution on parent Instagram and Facebook groups I cannot reach.