The Scorecard MVP
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
A scorecard is a structured online self-assessment that doubles as a minimum viable product and a lead-generation asset. Respondents answer questions across a few categories, receive a score and a breakdown of their weak areas, and hand over their email in exchange. Priestley's mechanism is psychological: quantifying a frustration with a number integrates the emotional and logical sides of a decision, so a score of 43 out of 100 creates immediate tension the person wants to close. For the business, it converts an untested idea into proprietary data — who is interested, what they struggle with, and whether you can generate leads at all before building anything. Priestley's own key person of influence scorecard was taken by 90,000 people and led to fifteen million pounds of back-end sales, and it became the origin of the ScoreApp business.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Pick the idea you want to test
Take one of the ideas from your ideation shortlist and frame it as a question people would want answered about themselves — 'are you ready to run a marathon', 'should you hire a personal assistant', 'is your diet optimised'.
Pro tip If you have three ideas and cannot choose, build three scorecards rather than one course.
- 2
Define three to five categories
Break the topic into a handful of scoreable dimensions. Ali's productivity example: vision, tactical planning, getting started, staying on course, tools and gadgets, and recovery. The categories are what make the result feel diagnostic rather than a quiz.
Watch out More than five categories dilutes the result and makes the report harder to act on.
- 3
Write about six questions per category
Roughly thirty questions total. Each question should surface a specific gap — do you do a weekly review, do you set a daily highlight — so the aggregate score is credible and the per-category breakdown is actionable.
Pro tip Every question adds a small dose of psychological tension, which is why the final score lands so hard.
- 4
Build the landing page, results page and report
You need a landing page, the questionnaire, a results page showing category scores, and ideally a PDF. Capture the email either before or after the questions — Priestley says it makes little difference.
- 5
Publish it free to any audience you can reach
Share it with your Facebook friends, a relevant forum, an Instagram list, or a YouTube video — a free scorecard is easy to mention without it feeling like a pitch. The point is to see whether anyone raises a hand.
Watch out If people will not take it for free, they will certainly not pay — that is the test doing its job.
- 6
Read the data and interview the respondents
Now you own proprietary data plus email addresses. Look at which categories score lowest across the population, then contact people and ask what they were trying to solve. That feeds product-market fit and tells you which product to build.
Pro tip Track month on month: 30, 50, 100, 150 is a signal to proceed; 30, 20, 10, 5 says stop.
In the wild
One of Priestley's early bespoke clients ran a DJ school and had a large social media following but no data. He launched a 'are you ready to become a professional DJ' scorecard measuring five areas. Thousands of people took it, and instead of an audience he suddenly had proprietary data and a list of leads who had revealed exactly where they were weak. The business grew significantly off the back of it — and the pattern of clients asking for their own version is what convinced Priestley to build ScoreApp.
→ A social following converted into thousands of qualified, self-diagnosed leads and a step change in the business.
Ali maps his productivity teaching onto categories: vision, tactics, takeoff and procrastination, staying focused, tools and gadgets, and rest. Thirty questions total. Someone scoring high on vision but zero on tools gets told exactly that, and is pointed only at the scheduling resources they need rather than the whole syllabus. Even if the course never ships, the aggregate data reveals what most respondents struggle with, which becomes the next video or book.
→ A free diagnostic that both qualifies buyers and dictates the content roadmap.
Common mistakes
Building the product before the scorecard
Spending months on a course, app or service before testing whether anyone will hand over an email for a free assessment inverts the risk. The scorecard costs hours; the product costs months.
Treating it as a trivia quiz
A quiz tests what someone knows and produces no tension. A scorecard benchmarks them against a standard and returns a number they want to improve, which is the entire psychological mechanism.
Collecting the data and never calling anyone
The email addresses and answers are the raw material for product-market fit interviews. Leaving them in the platform wastes the most valuable output of the exercise.
From the transcript
“a scorecard is where you essentially set up an online survey or question where people can Benchmark themselves and that is an amazing MVP minimum…”
“you want to boil it down to three to five categories”
“so if I can't generate the leads forget about the business”
From the episode
How Anyone Can Develop The Mindset Of A Multi-Million Dollar Entrepreneur - Daniel Priestley
Daniel Priestley