Trust score: the 8 factors, and the 3 you actually control

An investor opening your project sees a number before reading a sentence. Worth knowing how it's built.

Key points

• The score aggregates eight factors for a maximum of 100 points.
• Moving from verified to certified alone is worth a 7-point swing (8 against 15).
• Three levers depend on no external validation: completeness, the pitch deck, and activity.

What the score measures, and what it doesn't

The trust score rates the verifiable quality of the file, not the quality of the project. That distinction is uncomfortable, and it's deliberate.

No algorithm can tell whether your business model holds. It can tell whether your legal number is filled in, whether a pitch deck exists, whether you answer messages. Those elements predict success poorly, but they predict very well how comfortable an investor feels opening the file cold.

An excellent project, badly documented, will score badly. That looks unfair, and it's also the only information a third party can honestly produce from a distance.

The eight factors, in detail

Two rows deserve a stop.

The highest-yield factor: certification

Certification level is worth up to 15 points. A certified project gets 15, a verified one gets 8, a draft gets none.

Put differently, staying in draft costs 15 points out of 100. No other factor corrects with that kind of return.

Reaching verified requires a valid legal number and documents that agree with each other. Most files stuck in draft didn't fail that check. They never requested it.

The most neglected factor: the pitch deck

Plenty of owners treat the pitch deck as a document for later, once a meeting is booked. The score treats it as part of the file.

That matches what an investor actually does: they filter before they meet. A file with no presentation document forces them to reconstruct the project from form fields, and they won't do that fifteen times over.

Ten pages is enough. The problem, the offer, the market, the model, the team, the funding need, and precisely what the money pays for.

The order to pull the three levers in

If you have an afternoon, go in this order.

Completeness first. Go back through every empty field. An amount sought without justification caps the score whatever the project's real quality, because an unjustified amount isn't information. It's a wish.

Then the pitch deck. Ten pages, uploaded, even imperfect. A document you'll improve beats a document you plan to write. If the writing stalls, the AI business plan assistant produces a usable first structure.

Certification last. Legal number, articles of association, consistency across documents. It's the only lever that depends on outside validation, so start it last but don't sit on it.

The owner profile fills in alongside. It's quick and it counts.

The factors you can't move, and why they exist

Project age can't be forced. It's there because a file published eight months ago and kept current says something different from a file created last week.

Supporters can't be bought either. They rise when club members register interest, which presupposes a readable file. So they depend on the first three levers, with a lag.

Activity sits between the two. Nobody can fake it for long, and it separates a present owner from a file that was uploaded and abandoned. An owner who replies within forty-eight hours scores better than one who replies in three weeks, and more importantly gets called back.

What a good score doesn't do

It doesn't raise money. It gets the file opened.

That's most of the work already, because the majority of projects aren't rejected. They're never read. A high score buys careful attention. What you do with it afterwards is no longer an algorithm's business.

What to aim for, concretely

There is no official threshold, and we'd be wary of publishing one: it would instantly become a target to optimise rather than an indicator to earn.

In practice, three bands emerge from what we see.

Below 40, the file is incomplete to the point where an investor can't form a view. They don't reject it, they move to the next one. That's almost always a problem of empty fields, not of the project.

Between 40 and 70, the file is legible. It gets opened, sometimes read in full, and it generates questions. That's where the conversation happens, and it's a band most projects can reach in a day's work.

Above 70 takes time you can't make up: age, supporters, a history of activity. A project published last week cannot be there, and that's fine.

So the realistic short-term goal is to leave the first band. The rest follows if the file is kept current.

A common mistake: optimising the score without updating the file

We regularly see owners fill every field in one evening, land a good score, then leave the project untouched for six months.

The score holds for a while, then the activity factor drifts down. More importantly, the gap becomes visible: an investor opening a complete file whose numbers are a year old draws a conclusion about the owner's seriousness, not about how well the form was filled.

A quarterly update is enough. Has the amount sought moved? Has the team changed? Is there one more contract worth mentioning? Three questions, twenty minutes, and the file stays true.