Six Ways a Product Dies Before It Is Scored

The six gates

Regulatory. Legally or regulatorily blocked — a missing approval, a prohibited ingredient, liability exposure without coverage.

Intellectual property. A patent, design or trademark conflict. Not a suspicion; a conflict.

Advertising policy. The category cannot be advertised, or can only be advertised crippled, on Meta, Google or TikTok. For a DTC product this is not a constraint, it is the absence of an engine.

Perishability without a chain. Cold chain or shelf life beyond what the operation can actually do.

Safety. A realistic risk of injury or harm under intended use.

Structurally negative unit economics. Contribution margin mathematically below zero at any realistic price. Not “tight.” Below zero.

Why they sit outside the score

Because a weighted average is a machine for hiding one catastrophic value inside twenty acceptable ones. A product can be extraordinary on 81 factors and un-advertisable on the eighty-second, and the honest output is not “8.4 out of 10.” It is no.

Keeping these binary and outside the arithmetic is what stops the score from being talked into things.

What it means if you hit one

Usually that the product needs a different route to market, not a better pitch — retail, B2B, a licensing deal, a different jurisdiction. Occasionally it means a fixable paperwork gap, and we say which.

What it never means is that you should try again with the same file and warmer adjectives. The gates do not read adjectives.

Being told early is the product

A knockout delivered in three business days costs you three business days. The same knockout discovered after the first production run costs you the run, the inventory, and the year.

Evidence beats claims — how we check the things an application tells us.