An idea
Would you use this?
Asked first, on its own.
- How real is the problem?
- How many people need this?
- How different is this from what exists?
- How hard is this to pull off?
Put your thinking on the record.
Founders here publish the ideas they are weighing, the decisions they had to make and the companies that did not work — then put two positions head to head and let the community decide. What comes out of it stays on the profile.
- Founders
- 305,346
- Votes cast
- 1,621
- Startups
- 102,020
Which developer tool would your team still be using in a year?
Ship the integration firstWon73%+16 rating
Fix onboarding first27%-16 rating
An example of a settled duel. The first real result replaces it. Ratings shown as 1500 at the start.
The internet keeps a careful record of your outcomes and none at all of your reasoning.
Written down
- The funding announcement
- The launch post
- The growth chart
- The hiring update
- The acquisition news
- The conference photo
- The milestone thread
- The press release
Gone
- What you actually believed.
- Why you chose that, and not the other thing.
- What you got wrong.
- What it cost you to find out.
Every founder builds the second list. Almost none of it survives, because there has never been anywhere sensible to put it. A thread scrolls away. A pitch deck goes in a folder. The reasoning behind the hardest call you made this year exists in your head and nowhere else.
Why this exists
A company is a few thousand decisions in a trench coat.
You make them with incomplete information, usually alone, usually faster than you would like. Some of them are the company. And the only feedback most founders ever get on a decision is whether the company that contained it survived, which is a slow and extremely expensive way to find out you were wrong.
FounderDuels exists to make that feedback arrive earlier and in public. Put the decision up before the outcome is known. Let other founders argue with it. Keep what they said next to what you did.
Not to produce a winner — so that a founder can be known for how they think, and not only for what happened to them.
- Which market
- What to charge
- Who to hire
- When to pivot
- Whether to raise
- What to build next
- Which customer to say no to
- When to stop
Every one of those is a thing founders write up here, with the reasoning attached. Read some
How it works
Six steps, and none of them can be bought.
- Put your name on a profileYour founder page and the startups you have built. It is the address everything else attaches to.
- Enter a duel, or start oneChallenge a specific founder, post it open for anyone to take, or put a question up for the community to argue.
- Make your caseBoth sides write in private. Neither entry is visible until voting opens, so nobody is answering the other.
- The community decidesFounders and readers vote on the argument in front of them. The split stays hidden until you have voted yourself.
- The result goes on the recordWin or lose, it stays on both profiles. Nothing is quietly deleted because it went the wrong way.
- Your rating movesFounder Rating shifts with the result and the strength of who you faced. It is earned in public and only in duels.
Duels
One question. Two positions. A room that decides.
You pick a format, write one clear question and name an opponent — or post it open and let founders apply. Both sides write in private. When the entries are in, voting opens and the arguments appear together.
| Format | Competing | Each side writes | Moves rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founder DuelFounder vs founder. Each side makes their case and the community picks who they back. | Founders | Your case | Yes |
| Startup DuelStartup vs startup. Each founder represents their startup and argues why it wins. | Startups | Why your startup wins | Yes |
| Pitch DuelTwo founders submit pitches. Voters decide which pitch they would back. | Founders | Your pitch, Deck or video link | Yes |
| Product DuelTwo products compete. Voters decide which one they would rather use. | Startups | Your product, Demo link | Yes |
| Strategy DuelBoth founders answer the same business scenario. The sharper decision wins. | Founders | Your answer | Yes |
| Opinion DuelFounders defend opposing positions on a question. The more convincing side wins. | Founders | Your position, Your argument | Yes |
| Community TopicA question the community puts up, argued as two positions. Anyone can vote, and a founder can claim a side later. | Founders | The case for this side | No |
For everyone else
A vote here is not a like.
You do not need to have founded anything. You need to have an opinion about which of two arguments is better, which is a thing most people are good at and almost never asked.
A like disappears into a counter. A vote closes a question and leaves a mark on someone’s public record.
- You read both sides before either knows what the other said
- Both founders write in private and the entries unlock together. Nobody is rebutting anybody, so you are judging two arguments rather than a thread.
- You see the split only after you have voted
- By default the running score is hidden until your vote is in. It is the difference between deciding and agreeing with whoever got there first.
- One person, one vote, and it is final
- Votes cannot be changed or withdrawn. Duplicate and coordinated voting is reviewed and removed from the count, even when that changes who won.
- It settles something
- Enough votes and the duel produces a result that goes onto two public profiles and moves two ratings. Too few, and it is recorded as no contest rather than fudged into a winner.
Most duels are open to anyone. Some creators ask voters to sign in. The full voting rules
What happens afterwards
A poll closes and disappears. This one goes on your profile.
That is the entire difference, and it is not a small one. It is the reason people write a real argument instead of a quick take, and the reason a win here is worth having. Losses stay too. A record you can edit is not a record.
A question
One thing, asked so that two people can genuinely disagree about it.
Two arguments
Written in private, unlocked together.
A vote
One per person, final, split hidden until yours is in.
A result
Counted on the server when the clock runs out.
Two records
It goes on both profiles. Including the one that lost.
Two ratings
Both move, by an amount that depends on who you faced.
If too few people vote, the duel is recorded as no contest: no winner, no loser, no rating change. We would rather have a gap in the record than a result nobody earned. How results are decided
Founder Rating
One number, and only one way to move it.
It is Elo — the chess rating — applied to decided duels. Beating someone stronger moves it more than beating someone weaker. Nothing else touches it: not payments, not featured placement, not verification, not how much you publish, not how many people follow you.
Everyone starts here
1500
- The formula
- old + 32 × (result − expected)
- Expected score comes from the gap between the two ratings.
- An even match
- ±16
- The most a single duel can move it is 32.
- A result needs votes
- 3 minimum
- Below that it is a no contest: no winner, no loser, no change.
- A tie
- no change
- Neither rating moves, and a winner is never picked at random.
- You are unranked until your first completed duel, and your rating cannot fall below 100.
- Ranking order is rating, then total wins, then who joined first — so two founders never share a place.
- Rating history is append-only. A correction is a new entry, never a quiet edit, so every change can be traced.
What a score means
“Rated by the community” is meaningless unless you can see the questions.
So here they are. Everything published here is scored out of 100, built from specific questions chosen for that kind of thing. Two of them are deliberately kept out of the score and reported on their own.
A decision
Would you have made the same call?
Asked first, on its own.
- How sound is the reasoning?
- How well judged was the timing?
- How well was the risk handled?
- How did it actually turn out?
A failure
Did this teach you something you did not know?
Asked first, on its own.
- How honest is this account?
- How far past the surface does it go?
- How specific is it, rather than general advice?
A challenge
Did this change your view?
Asked first, on its own.
- How strong is the reasoning?
- How well is it backed up?
- Does it represent the original fairly?
A product
Would you use it?
Asked first, on its own.
- How well does it solve the problem?
- How good is it for what it costs?
- How different is it from the alternatives?
A startup
Would you want to work here?
Asked first, on its own.
- How good is the product?
- How sound is the way they make money?
- How clearly do they stand apart?
A new score stays near the middle
Until enough people have rated something, the score is pulled toward the average. One enthusiastic friend cannot make an idea look validated.
Authors cannot rate their own work
Nor can they remove a rating they did not like. The raw answers are kept, and the score is recounted from them rather than nudged.
Difficulty is not a penalty
How hard an idea is to execute, and how a decision turned out, are shown next to the score instead of inside it. A hard idea is not a worse idea.
For founders
Eight reasons to put your name on one of these.
All of it is free. None of it is a growth loop dressed as a feature — each one is a thing you can do today, with the page that does it linked underneath.
A record nobody can write for you
Your profile carries a Founder Rating earned only in duels, the results that moved it, and everything you have published with what the community scored it. You cannot buy any of it, and you cannot quietly delete the parts that went badly.
Test an idea on people who are not your friends
Post what you are thinking of building. Readers answer ten specific questions — is the problem real, would they use it, would they pay, how hard is it to pull off — and you get a score out of 100 plus the spread, so you can see whether people agree with each other or not.
Argue with someone who disagrees, properly
Challenge a founder to a duel on one question. You both write in private, both entries unlock at once, and the community votes on the argument rather than on who posted first. Nobody is replying to anybody.
Show the reasoning, not just the result
Write up a decision with what you considered, what you chose and why, what you expected and what actually happened. It is rated on the thinking, and how it turned out is reported separately — because a good decision can still go badly.
Get the failure out of your head
Eight questions, honestly answered, including the ones nobody publishes: what you believed, when you knew, what it cost you personally. It is scored on how much another founder learns, never on how badly it went.
Be found by people looking for someone like you
The directory filters by industry, country, category, stage and verification. Your startup gets its own page with your team, what you ship and your duel record on it.
Learn from founders further along
Read how someone priced the thing you are about to price, or why a company in your market closed. Follow the founders whose reasoning you want to keep seeing.
Compete for something real
Competitions run as seeded knockout brackets of ordinary duels, judged by the community and, in some rounds, by judges scoring both sides. Win every match and you take the title.
Your founder profile
One address for how you think.
Not a feed and not a CV. A rating earned only in duels, every result that moved it, everything you have published and what the community scored it — on one page, at one link, that stays true whether the last one went well or badly.
- A rating that starts where everyone else's starts
- Wins, losses and ties, each still readable with the argument that decided it
- The ideas, decisions and failures you have written up, with their scores
- What you have given back: what you rated, and what you argued with
Shah Fahad
@shahfahad
Founder & CEO of Yarqat · Software engineer building AI agents, custom software and cloud solutions
1516
Founder Rating
- Rank
- #5
- Duels
- 1–0
- Published
- 4
1 decided duel on the record, each still readable with the argument that won it.
For startups
A company page that is attached to people who argue in public.
There are enough startup directories. What none of them have is the founder standing behind the listing, defending a pricing decision, writing up the pivot, losing a product duel to a competitor and leaving the result up.
Add your company, or ask to be added to one that is already here — claims are reviewed by a person, with evidence.
- The team
- Every founder on it, with their role, linking to their own record.
- What you ship
- Products with what they do, who they are for, and what they cost.
- A duel record
- Startups compete directly: product against product, company against company.
- The numbers, if you want
- Stage, funding, team size, revenue range — each optional, and financials hidden unless you show them.
- What the community made of it
- Scored on whether people would work there, whether the product is good, whether the business model holds.
- How it ended, if it did
- Acquired, merged, paused or closed. A company that stops existing does not stop being interesting.
Stories
Some of it is not an argument. It is just what happened.
Long-form, written by the founder who lived it, rated on one question: was this worth your time. No score on the page until people have actually read it.
What the blank page suggests, when you start one:
Failures
Success gets published. Failure gets deleted.
A company closes and takes everything it learned with it. The site comes down, the founder writes one gracious post, and the four years of specific, expensive knowledge inside it are gone.
Founders write theirs up here as an interview rather than an essay, because an essay lets you skip the part that hurts. It is scored on how much another founder learns — never on how badly it went.
It is, consistently, the most read thing on this platform. That should tell you something about what founders actually want.
The eight questions, in the order they are asked:
- Why did you start it?
- What did you believe would work?
- What actually happened?
- What went wrong?
- What was your biggest mistake?
- When did you realise it was failing?
- What would you do differently?
- What should other founders avoid?
Plus the facts that make them comparable: how long it lasted, what was raised, what it cost the founder personally, and whether they would build it again. Every number is optional.
Recently written up
Duelboard2023–2024
I built the scoreboard before anyone had anything to score
A first attempt at this that launched as a leaderboard with nothing underneath it, and learned that reputation infrastructure is worthless without the content it ranks.
Challenges
Disagreeing with someone, without the comment section.
Anyone can reply to a founder’s idea with “this will never work”. A challenge asks you to do the harder version: state which claim you are arguing with, make the case, show what backs it, and say what you would do instead.
It becomes its own page, rated on the argument rather than on whether the room already agreed with you.
- What exactly are you challenging?Name the claim. Not the person, not the general vibe of the post.
- Why do you think it is wrong?The argument itself, which is the part that gets rated.
- What backs that up?Experience, numbers, a case you watched happen.
- What would you do instead?Criticism without an alternative scores badly here, by design.
Disagrees
You think the conclusion is wrong.
Partly agrees
You accept some of it, but not the part that matters.
Offers an alternative
The reasoning holds, but there is a better option.
The founder you challenged gets one reply, published underneath yours. One each — enough to answer, not enough to argue.
Discover
Three ways in, depending on what you came for.
Search covers all of it at once — founders, startups, duels, competitions, categories and everything anyone has published. The boards are for when you want to browse rather than look something up.
Unclaimed profiles
Some pages here describe founders who never signed up.
A directory of only the people who happened to register is a worse directory. So some profiles are added before their founder arrives — and every one of them says, at the top of the page, that nobody has claimed it.
They hold no writing, no opinions and no ratings. Nothing is ever published in someone else’s name.
- Found hereA page exists with a founder's name, what they build and where it came from. It holds nothing they wrote.
- Not yet claimedThe page says so at the top, every time, with a link to the source and a link to have it removed.
- ClaimedThey send an email address and links a person can check. No automatic approval.
- TheirsWe hand over the page that already exists — same address, same history — and they set a password.
Claiming is reviewed by a person, not a script, and approving one closes every other claim on the same page. The founder keeps the address they were already found at, which is the only sensible way round: the link someone sent last month should still work.
Following
Keep the founders whose reasoning you want to keep reading.
No requests to approve, no reciprocity, nothing to maintain. You follow a founder and their work stays findable to you — including founders who have not signed up yet, so you hear about it when they do.
First-time founders
You do not need a company to belong here.
Students, indie hackers, people with a side project and people still deciding whether to start. The most useful thing on this site for you is other people’s mistakes, and those are free to read.
- Read what actually happened
- Not the launch post. The pricing decision, the co-founder fallout, the year it took to find out nobody wanted it.
- Rate and vote from day one
- Nothing here is gated behind having a company. Your vote counts the same as a founder's.
- Put up an idea before you build it
- Find out whether people would use it, pay for it, or build it themselves — before you spend a year finding out the expensive way.
- Start at the same number
- Every founder begins at the same rating, including the ones with an exit behind them. It only moves on results.
Investors, operators, organisations
Everything public here is readable without an account.
No tier, no access request, no dashboard. Profiles, duels, results, ideas, decisions and failures are open pages, and search covers all of them.
What this is not
There are no investor accounts, no company evaluations and no due-diligence product. A score here is a community answer to a stated question, not a signal about where to put money. Read it as an opinion, because that is what it is.
- How a founder thinks, before you meet them
- Their arguments, the decisions they have written up, and what other founders made of the reasoning.
- What closed, and why
- Post-mortems written by the founder, with the cause named and the lesson attached.
- What a market's founders disagree about
- Duels are a list of questions people building in a space genuinely cannot agree on.
- Companies you would not otherwise see
- Startups listed by their own founders, with the team and the products on the page.
Where this fits
Everything optimises for something. Most of it isn’t reasoning.
| The format | Optimises for | Which means |
|---|---|---|
| A social network | Followers | The loudest account wins, and being wrong costs nothing. |
| A directory | Listings | Everyone who filled in the form looks identical. |
| A review site | Reviews | Tells you about the product. Says nothing about the people. |
| A poll | One question | Answers it, then deletes the answer. |
| A pitch competition | One evening | A verdict from five people who will never think about it again. |
| This | Reasoning, in public | Positions, arguments, scores against stated questions, and a record that keeps the losses. |
Plenty of platforms do one of these things better than we do. None of them puts a founder’s thinking, their company, the arguments they have had about it and what the room concluded at the same address.
Start to record
Nine steps, and you can stop at any of them.
Plenty of people never get past the first. Reading and voting is a complete way to use this.
Arrive
Read a duel, a failure, an idea. Vote on something. None of it needs an account.
Take a profile
Create one, or claim the page that already describes you.
Say what you build
Add your startup, and the products it ships.
Publish something
An idea you are weighing, or a decision you already made.
Get scored
Readers answer the specific questions for that kind of thing. You see the spread, not just the number.
Enter a duel
Challenge a founder, or post it open and let someone apply.
Get a result
Voting closes, the result is counted, both ratings move.
Write the hard one
The failure, once you can stand to. It is the most read thing on this site.
Have a record
Rating, results, everything published, and what the community made of it — at one address.
Why it compounds
The useful part is the part that accumulates.
A single rated idea is mildly interesting. Ten thousand of them, with the reasoning and the arguments attached, is a record of how a generation of founders actually thought — and that is the thing worth building.
A founder publishes something they are unsure about
Other founders rate it and argue with it
The result stays on their record
That record is what makes them worth finding
Readers arrive looking for exactly that
Some of them are founders, and publish too
Then it starts again, with more people in the room. Which is why the early ones matter more than the later ones.
Right now
What is actually happening here today.
Recently published
Discover everythingStandings
Full leaderboard| # | Founder | W–L | 7d | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1–0 | — | 1516 |
How this is kept honest
A record is only worth having if it is hard to fake.
Seven rules we hold ourselves to. Each one is documented somewhere you can go and read, which is the only version of this section worth printing.
- The ranking maths is published
- The formula, the K factor, the floor, the tie rule and the ordering, read live from the platform's own settings rather than written from memory.
- Ranking methodology
- Money buys visibility, never results
- Featured placement is always labelled and never changes a ranked position. No purchase moves a vote, a result, a rating or a rank, and verification is not for sale.
- What each product does
- Votes are checked, and removed when they are fake
- Duplicate and coordinated voting is reviewed. Confirmed manipulation is excluded from the count even when that changes who won, and the duel's result is corrected rather than left standing.
- Community guidelines
- Nothing is published in someone else's name
- Unclaimed pages say so at the top, link to where they came from, and hold no writing. Claims are reviewed by a person against evidence.
- How claiming works
- Every admin action on a result is logged
- With a reason attached. Rating history is append-only, so a correction is a new entry and the original stays visible.
- Competitions have written rules
- Entry, judging, how a tie is broken and how a winner is decided, published before the bracket starts.
- Competition rules
- You can take your things and leave
- Export everything you have written, or close the account. Closing hides the profile immediately and releases the email after a grace period.
- Privacy policy
Questions people arrive with
Answered from how the platform works today, not how it might work later.
What is FounderDuels?
A public record of how founders think. Founders publish the ideas they are weighing, the decisions they have made and the companies that failed; they put two positions head to head in a duel; and the community rates the work and votes on the argument. Results stay on the profile.
Who is it for?
Founders who want a record of their reasoning, and anyone who wants to read one. You do not need a company, or an account, to read and vote.
It is equally for first-time founders and for people who have built several — everyone starts at the same rating.
Is it free?
Yes. Creating a profile, publishing, voting, rating, entering duels and applying to competitions are all free. Paid products exist for visibility only, and nothing you can buy changes a vote, a result, a rating or a rank.
How does a duel work?
You choose a format, ask one clear question and either name an opponent or post it open for founders to apply. Both sides write their entry in private. When both are in, voting opens and the entries appear together.
When the clock runs out the valid votes are counted. With at least 3 valid votes the duel has a result, which goes on both profiles and moves both ratings. With fewer, it is recorded as a no contest and nothing changes.
What is a Founder Rating?
An Elo rating — the same family used in chess — applied to decided duels. Everyone starts at 1500. Beating a stronger founder moves it more than beating a weaker one, and the most a single duel can move it is 32.
Nothing else touches it: not payments, not featured placement, not verification, not how much you publish, not how many followers you have.
How are founders ranked?
By rating, then by total wins, then by who joined first — so two founders never share a position. You appear in the rankings once you have completed at least one duel; until then your profile says Unranked.
Can non-founders vote?
Yes. Most duels are open to anyone, and some creators choose to limit voting to signed-in voters. One vote per person per duel, votes are final, and you cannot vote in a duel you are taking part in.
What does a score out of 100 actually mean?
It is built from specific questions asked about that kind of thing — whether you would use an idea, whether a decision's reasoning was sound, whether a failure taught you something. A new score stays near the middle until enough people have rated it, and authors cannot rate their own work.
Two things are reported next to the score rather than inside it: how hard an idea is to execute, and how a decision turned out.
Why would I write up a failure?
Because it is the most read kind of page here, and because the knowledge inside a company that closed is otherwise lost entirely. It is an eight-question interview rather than an essay, and it is scored on how much another founder learns — never on how badly it went.
What is a challenge?
A structured counter-position against something a specific person published. You name the claim you are arguing with, make the case, show what backs it and say what you would do instead. The author of the original gets one reply.
It is not an open prompt anyone can answer — that is an open challenge on a duel, which is a different thing.
Can I claim a profile that describes me?
Yes. Some founder pages are added before their founder arrives, and each says so at the top with a link to where it came from. If a page describes you, file a claim with an email address and links a person can check. Once approved we hand over the page that already exists, at the same address — you set a password and it is yours.
If you would rather it was not here at all, ask us and we will remove it.
Can I claim my startup?
Yes. If your company already has a page, ask to be added to its team with evidence of your role. A person reviews it, and approving the claim adds you to the team so you can edit the page, add products and enter startup duels.
What are competitions?
A competition is a seeded knockout bracket built out of ordinary duels: founders apply, get matched, and the community votes each round. Some rounds add judges who score both sides, weighted against the community vote by an amount published on the competition page.
What happens if someone tries to rig a vote?
Duplicate and coordinated voting is flagged and reviewed. Votes confirmed as manipulation are excluded from the count, even when that changes who won, and a finished duel's result is corrected rather than left standing. Rating history is append-only, so the correction is visible.
Can I delete something that went badly?
You can remove your own writing. You cannot remove a duel result — a record you can edit is not a record. Closing your account hides your profile and stops your name appearing on it.
Your decisions are the most interesting thing about you.
Nobody is keeping them. Put one on the record — an idea you are unsure about, a call you had to make, the company that did not work — and find out what people who have been there make of it.
Free. No card. Reading and voting need no account at all.