Building ScopeCheck
in public.

The first design pass used terminal green — the kind you see on dev tools everywhere. Looked right technically, but felt wrong. Too generic. Then it clicked: I run Raspberry Ventures. Raspberry is literally my favourite fruit. The brand colour was sitting right there the whole time.

So we switched. Dark background, raspberry #d4286a as primary, warm amber for data highlights. The blinking cursor at the terminal prompt is raspberry-coloured. Small detail, but it makes me smile every time I look at it.

Phase 0 through Phase 4 is coded and building clean. Next.js app router, Supabase schema ready to run, all routes stubbed:

/[handle] — investor profile with QR
/[handle]/apply — founder application form
/[handle]/for-llm — machine readable criteria
/f/[handle] — founder passport
/dashboard — investor kanban
/log — this page

The kanban triage is satisfying. Thumbs up moves a deal to considering, thumbs down fires a rejection email using the investor's own template. Simple and fast.

Stack: Next.js 15 + Supabase + Vercel. No native app — QR display is a full-screen tap on the mobile web page. That's 90% of the value for near-zero build cost.

Every investor and founder profile auto-generates a plain-text machine-readable version at /for-llm. No HTML, no styling — just clean key: value pairs that any LLM or search crawler can parse without effort.

This is the AI-native angle made tangible. Right now it's just a page. In two years, it's how AI deal-sourcing agents discover and match investors with founders without anyone filling in a form.

We build it now because retrofitting AI readability later is always harder. And honestly, the /for-llm link at the bottom of every profile is a small signal that tells the right kind of person: this was built by someone who thinks about where this is going.

Someone asked if this needs a native app. It doesn't — and building one would be a mistake at this stage.

Here's the use case: founder is at a networking event, meets an investor. They want to share their passport instantly. Pulling up scopecheck.ai/f/yourcompany on your phone and tapping "Show QR" fills the screen with a scannable code. The investor's phone camera reads it, lands on the passport page.

That interaction takes 4 seconds. A native app would take 4 minutes to explain and install.

PWA (installable web app) comes later. For now, mobile-optimised web + a full-screen QR tap is everything the use case needs.

The honest tension in this product: founders have the most pain (filling in the same info 50 times, applying into black boxes) but they're notoriously hard to monetise. Investors have a real operational pain too but they're slower to adopt new tools.

The answer: build for founders first because they drive the flywheel. A founder creates their passport, shares scopecheck.ai/f/theircompany with investors, an investor clicks it and thinks "I want one of these for my inbound." That's a product-led growth loop that doesn't require cold sales.

The "what we're looking for in an investor" field on the founder passport is a deliberate choice. Most tools don't ask founders what they want. That signal — this product respects you — is what makes founders share it enthusiastically.

The positioning clicked when I stopped thinking about this as a platform and started thinking about it as a smarter link.

bit.ly shortens URLs. ScopeCheck makes URLs carry structured context. An investor's link isn't just a webpage — it's a machine-readable description of exactly what they're looking for. A founder's link isn't just a profile — it's a portable pitch that pre-fills application forms anywhere.

This framing changes what you build. You're not building a marketplace. You're building infrastructure. The difference matters for how you talk about it, how you distribute it, and what success looks like in year 3.

I get 20+ founder messages a week. Every single one lands differently — LinkedIn DM, WhatsApp forward, cold email, intro from a mutual connection. There's no structure. No memory. No way to triage efficiently.

Meanwhile I watch founders spend hours crafting cold outreach into black boxes. They don't know if they fit. They don't know if anyone read it. They fill in the same information 50 different times.

The weird thing: every investor builds the same intake process from scratch. Every syndicate lead has the same "we invest in world-changing founders" page that says nothing. Every solo GP is drowning in WhatsApp deal flow with no infrastructure to handle it.

I already built a manual version of this on my own site — my Scope Check page. Today I bought scopecheck.ai. Let's build it properly.