Forgehaven Labs

Free download · The Kill-Gate Pack

Decide when to quit before you start.

Five one-page templates for pre-registering a kill gate: the numbers, the date, and the verdict, written down before the first dollar or weekend goes in. These are not blank theory. Each one is the sanitized version of a gate that actually ran, or is running right now, on our own portfolio.

Get the pack See the audit it came from

Markdown + printable PDF · no login for the stubbed version · one of these gates killed a system with 626 passing tests

What's inside

Four gates and the guide that makes them stick.

  • App / product kill gate

    Template

    The day-60 checkpoint and day-90 verdict for a consumer app or product launch: a metrics allowlist you can actually read, fair-test prerequisites, and a KILL condition in numbers. The original is pointed at our own flagship app right now.

  • Content-channel gate

    Template

    Three staged gates for a YouTube channel, newsletter, or blog: craft at unit 10, audience and funnel at month 4, business at month 6. Plus the standing triggers, including the honest one about invented drama.

  • Marketplace-experiment gate

    Template

    A bounded test for Etsy, app stores, or any marketplace bet: capped cash, a fixed verdict date, pass thresholds on sales, gross, and conversion, and an auto-kill on policy flags.

  • Acquisition pause rule

    Template

    For buying small products or businesses: a sourcing pause rule so you stop before overpaying, a post-purchase stabilize-and-sell trigger, and the two-strikes program kill.

  • How to pre-register a kill gate

    Guide

    The one-page method: the seven parts every gate needs, the four ways founders cheat their own gates, and the rule that keeps a verdict a verdict.

  • Formats

    Zip

    Six markdown files you can drop into any repo, plus a single printable PDF of the whole pack. Fill in the blanks, get it initialed, put the verdict date in a calendar.

Receipts

These gates ran for real.

The pack is assembled from the working documents of this portfolio, not written for the download page. What the originals have done so far:

Killed a paper-trading desk at a 6/6 FAIL scorecard, with 626 tests green Froze a video pipeline holding 1,153 finished renders, published: 0 Caught 11 zombie jobs still running five days after a product was "killed" Day-90 verdict currently armed on our flagship app in App Store review

Full write-ups of each of these, dashboards included, publish in The Autopsy.

Download

Get the Kill-Gate Pack.

Direct download, for now.

The email edition is not live yet, so the pack is a plain download today. When the list opens this page will trade the pack for an email address; if you got here early, you got the better deal.

  • Six markdown templates, ready to drop into a repo
  • One printable PDF of the whole pack
  • Free for your own projects and your clients' projects
Download the pack (zip)

Prefer just the paper? The PDF on its own. Want the posts as they publish? See the newsletter.

Enter your email; the pack arrives in the welcome note.

You also get each Autopsy post the day it publishes. One email per post, unsubscribe any time.