How Makers Imprint decides what is worth making
Every idea starts at 1 and earns points from three things: whether someone has first-hand experience of it, whether it points at something you sell, and whether there is a story in it. The total puts the idea in a band. Only the top two bands clear the bar to be made. Nothing is ever deleted, and every score shows exactly where its points came from.
The three things that raise an idea's worth
Experience, worth the most. Has a named person actually done or seen the thing this idea is about? If yes, it earns 3 points, and the score records who. This is the input an AI model cannot fake: it can write the average of everything published on a topic, but it cannot have been there. When nobody has said either way, the idea is marked unknown and flagged to find out. That is not a penalty. "We have not asked yet" and "no" are different answers, and the engine keeps them apart.
Fit: does it point at something that pays? Content here is a way to bring people to a product, so an idea earns points for its relationship to revenue: 3 if it serves something that sells directly, 2 for something about to go on sale, 1 for a free tool that sends people to something that sells, and 0 if it points at nothing. A 0 is flagged as "funnels nowhere". It is flagged, not thrown away.
The first version got fit wrong. It scored how live a product was, and a free tool that was fully launched outscored a paid product that was still coming online. That is backwards for a business: the free tool earns nothing on its own. Fit now measures the relationship to revenue, not how finished something is, and it is one of the reasons the method is published. A score you cannot read is a score you cannot catch being wrong.
Story. Is there a tellable story in it: something that happened, with a turn in it? If yes, 2 points. One story is enough to switch it on. More stories make a better piece, not a higher score.
The bands, and the bar
| Score | Band | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Potential | Nothing established yet. Kept, not killed. |
| 2 to 3 | Low | Does not clear the bar today. |
| 4 to 6 | Medium | Clears the bar. |
| 7 to 9 | High | Clears the bar, with room to spare. |
With the default numbers the highest possible score is 9: the starting 1, plus 3 for experience, 3 for fit and 2 for story. Adding them straight up, rather than through a hidden formula, is the point. You can look at any idea and see why it landed where it did.
What is deliberately left out of the score
Demand. Whether a topic is hot right now changes when you should make something, not whether it is worth making. So demand orders ideas within a band and never moves one into a different band. A trend cannot promote a weak idea.
Which product you are pushing this quarter. That is a scheduling decision with its own written justification, kept on the product rather than on the idea. A great idea for a product you are not focused on is still a great idea. You may simply not make it first.
Nothing is deleted
An idea that loses today is parked, not killed, and parking is reversible. When a parked idea comes back, it returns to triage and is decided again on its merits, rather than picking up where it left off. Something that was a bad idea in March can be the right one in September, and throwing it away would have lost it.
The score is a guess about priority, not a prediction
A high score means "this deserves your limited time first". It does not mean "this will perform". Checking scores against how the content actually did afterwards, and learning from the gap, is planned and not built yet. Until it is, the score is an honest, readable way to choose, not a forecast, and it should not be read as one.
Your numbers, the same shape
Each organization using Makers Imprint can change the numbers above, because your moat may sit somewhere different from ours. The shape stays fixed: the same factors, the same reasons behind them, and every score showing its parts. That fixed shape is what keeps a score readable. The Solo and Pro plans both include your own weights and your own guiding principle.
We run our own content decisions through exactly this, including the guides on this site. If something here is unclear, the common questions may cover it, or ask a person.