Version 1.0 · September 2026 · Published by The Roast Council
Zero to five flames for how well a decision has been tested. Not whether it will work. Whether it was tested.
AI made polish free.
Anyone can now produce a flawless pitch deck, business plan or strategy memo in thirty seconds. The fonts are right. The charts are clean. The market size is enormous. And none of it tells you whether the thinking underneath was ever tested.
Worse, the AI that wrote it was built to agree with the person who asked. It will call a weak idea "promising" and a guess "a data-driven insight". Every deck now looks like a winner, so the look of a winner means nothing.
The Roast Rating exists to fix one thing: tell people how much of a decision has actually been tested, in a form anyone can check.
We do not write the deck. We rate it.
The Roast Rating measures how well a decision has been tested. It grades evidence: named problems, verified facts, tests run, money received.
It does not predict whether the idea will succeed. Nobody can honestly grade the future, and anyone who claims to is selling something. A 5-flame idea can still fail. A 1-flame idea can still work. The rating tells you how much you are betting on belief versus evidence.
The rating is separate from the verdict. Every roast returns two things:
They can point in opposite directions, and that is the point. A Kill with 4 flames is a success. It means someone tested the idea properly, found it dead, and saved themselves a year. We would rather rate that founder highly than flatter one who never tested anything.
| Flames | Name | What must be true | Evidence required |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Untested belief | An idea exists. | None. |
| 1 | Problem named | There is a specific buyer, a specific pain, and the single most likely way the idea fails has been named. | A written statement of buyer, pain and fatal flaw. |
| 2 | Survived the roast | The fatal flaw has a credible answer, and the key assumptions are listed. | A completed roast by all six voices, with the assumptions written down. |
| 3 | Receipts checked | Prices, competitors and market size have been checked against real, dated sources. Anything not verified is marked unverified. | Source links with dates for every material claim. |
| 4 | Tested | A test was designed with a pass mark set before it ran, it was run, and the result was logged, pass or fail. | Proof of the test and its result (sign-up data, ad results, interview records, a live page), reviewed by us. |
| 5 | Proven | Real customers have paid real money, at a price that could sustain the business. | Proof of payment or signed commitment (receipts, contracts, letters of intent with terms), reviewed by us. |
Every roast is run by the six voices of the Council:
A roast can be run in two ways, and the rating always says which.
In our own content we rate decisions that are already public: companies that have closed, decks their founders have published, and announcements reported in the press. These ratings are run by the Council on our own system and are labelled "rated on public evidence" with the date. They use only what was publicly reported on that date, and their sources are listed. They can reach any level on the scale, because the evidence is in the open, but they are not Certified: nobody submitted proof to us, and we do not claim to know anything the public record does not.
Every rating is published on its own verification page, and every verification page shows:
AI models will produce a confident-sounding percentage on request. That number is not calibrated. A model that says "82%" is no more likely to be right than one that says "60%". Publishing it would be the exact kind of flattery this rating exists to end, so we do not.
We will publish a real percentage when we have earned one. Every rated decision is followed up at 30 and 90 days: what happened? Once enough outcomes are logged, ratings will carry a measured line, for example: "Past Reshape verdicts at 3 flames held up X% of the time." That figure will be calculated from real outcomes, and we will publish how we calculate it.
Evidence goes stale. Markets move, competitors launch, prices change.
A rating is only worth the independence behind it. Credit ratings failed in 2008 partly because the grade drifted toward the people paying for it. We have written the rules to prevent that.
A rating only counts if it links to a live verification page on roastcouncil.com.
Every Roast Rating badge carries a QR code and a short link in the form roastcouncil.com/v/…. If a deck shows flames with no link, or the link does not resolve to a matching verification page, treat it as unrated.
On the verification page, check four things:
If you screen many ideas, the Roast Rating gives you one number, checkable in a click, telling you how much of each application rests on evidence. Some programmes will want a minimum rating to apply. Others will use it to see which founders test their ideas and which only describe them.
We are looking for a small group of Founding Raters, programmes that will pilot the standard with their applicants and help shape version 2. Apply at roastcouncil.com.
1.0 · September 2026. First publication.
We will revise this standard in the open. Every change will be dated and listed here, and every rating states the version it was issued under.
The Roast Council. A roast, not a hug. roastcouncil.com