Maturity Gate
When you need this method
Analysis grids tend to get applied to everything that looks like software. That creates false precision: a pre-revenue deep-tech company gets red lights for layers it structurally cannot have yet, and a lender is measured against SaaS margins that are meaningless for its model. Misclassification at the start devalues every statement that follows.
Approach
- 1Before any scan, clarify the stage: from pre-revenue to mature, with a product in market and running revenue as the grid's normal case.
- 2Honestly screen out pre-revenue deep tech; it belongs in a different grid (technology readiness, option value, runway).
- 3For lenders and embedded finance, switch economics to spread mode instead of SaaS margins.
- 4For carve-outs and acqui-hires, mark standalone economics as not assessable or as a hypothesis, not as a weakness.
- 5Rule of thumb: if more than one layer is genuinely not assessable, it is probably not a case for this grid.
Typical application
A typical case: an analysis team scans a list of software companies with the same assessment grid. Two cases stand out: a deep-tech company far from first revenue, and a business carved out of a group whose cost base only comes into existence through the deal. Without the gate, both would have collected rows of red lights and skewed the evaluation. With the gate, the deep-tech case is excluded and the carve-out's economics are carried as an open hypothesis; the remaining statements are solid for it.
Limits and counter-indications
The gate is an upstream discipline, not an assessment method of its own; it makes no statement about business quality itself. Stage classification can itself be uncertain for opaque companies. As an individual building block the gate is not separately validated but part of the scanning practice.
How to measure impact
Share of analyses where scope and mode were documented before the scan, and the rate of subsequent reclassifications.
Related methods
Sources
- 1.Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow (opens in a new tab) · Harvard Business Review (Larry E. Greiner) · 1998 · academic and scholarly literature · supports the underlying mechanismCarries the principle that companies pass through distinguishable growth stages and that the same management practice either holds or fails depending on the stage. Greiner makes no claims about valuation or analytical frameworks.
- 2.Benchmarking Metrics for Bootstrapped SaaS Companies (opens in a new tab) · SaaS Capital · 2026 · investment, consulting and analyst firms, industry bodies and public agencies · provides benchmark figuresShows, from its own survey, that metrics differ clearly between bootstrapped and venture-funded vendors and between revenue sizes, meaning a comparison needs prior classification.
Origin: Convios