Write the kill date before you write the code.

For: a consumer app or product launch. Shape: a day-60 checkpoint (a reading, not yet a verdict) and a day-90 verdict, both on a metrics allowlist you can already read.

Kill or park if all are true, cumulative since Day 0: proceeds below your floor, and payers below your floor, and impressions flat despite two listing iterations and the launch batch. Continue if any: proceeds or payers clear the floor; or impressions grew at least 2x baseline with conversion at or above benchmark; or a durable external channel appeared.

Armed now on our flagship iOS app in App Store review. Its verdict cascades to the sibling apps built on the same thesis, so a single honest reading retires several bets at once.

For: a YouTube channel, newsletter, podcast, or blog. Content compounds slowly, so this gate is staged: craft first, audience second, business third.

Gate A, craft (at unit 10): retention at or above your floor (we used 35%), click-through at or above your floor (we used 3%), one breakout unit (we used over 1,000 views). Gate B, audience and funnel (at month 4): subscribers and tracked clicks to your site, UTM-tagged, at or above floors (we used 250 subs and 200 clicks). Gate C, business (at month 6): a binary continue-or-kill on subscribers, monetization trajectory, tracked clicks, or a signed deal. A standing trigger: if the honest version of an episode is boring, the thesis is wrong, and that is a verdict too.

Written before video 1 existed. The owner's recurring time is capped in the gate itself, not left to hope.

For: a bounded bet on someone else's marketplace: Etsy, an app store, a plugin or template registry. The marketplace owns the traffic and the rules, so this gate caps the cash, fixes the verdict date, and auto-kills on policy trouble.

Pass, all true on the verdict date: sales, gross revenue, and conversion on a minimum visit count all clear their floors (we used 15 sales, $120 gross, 1% on 1,500 visits). Middle band (we used 5 to 14 sales): one pre-registered extension in the single best niche, no new cash above the cap. Auto-kill: a set number of policy flags (we used 2), regardless of sales. The cash cap is a wall, not a guideline.

Armed on our Etsy digital-downloads experiment, gate written before listing 1. Run in a separate account so a flag here cannot damage anything that already works.

For: buying a small product or business. Acquisitions fail differently from builds: the expensive mistakes are buying the wrong thing because you got tired of looking, and refusing to admit a bought thing is dying because real money went in.

Sourcing pause: after a set window and a set number of completed diligences with no deal passing the buy-box (we used 90 days and 10 diligences), pause sourcing for months. The conclusion is "this tier is picked over," not "lower the bar." Post-purchase gate: at month 6, if revenue falls below a fraction of close-date revenue or owner time exceeds the budget for several weeks, stabilize and sell inside a fixed window. The sunk purchase price is not an argument; it is the bias this rule exists to beat.

Written into our acquisition thesis before deal one. Two post-purchase fires falsify the strategy for this operator.

For: a product that sells into a regulated, deadline-driven market, where the binding constraint is trust and timing rather than raw demand. The gate has to survive a market that is real but slow, so it pairs an early proof-of-wedge date with a later scale-or-wind-down date.

Early gate: by a dated checkpoint tied to the regulatory deadline, clear a revenue floor and a customer-count floor (we used a set revenue figure and a set number of customers by a fixed date), or the wedge is disproven and the line is killed. Later gate: by a second date, clear a higher revenue floor or wind the line down to zero-touch. The regulatory calendar sets the dates; you do not get to move them because the build is late.

Modeled on our own compliance-product line, whose gates are pinned to an external certification deadline rather than to internal optimism.