Identity · Verification ladder
How votes earn their weight.
startup.games uses a five-rung ladder to decide how much each vote counts. Anonymous votes count. Signed-in votes count more. You move up the ladder by doing the work, never by clicking a button.
None of this is gated. The site reads the same to a first-time visitor and an audited operator; the ladder only changes how much your back/pass shifts the leaderboard.
01
Self-attested
An anonymous visitor backs a startup from this browser. No sign-in, no claims about who they are. Just a device fingerprint.
Unlocks Votes count at base weight (×1). The viral surface works pre-auth on purpose.
02
Platform-observed
The Spectator signs in via id.org.ai. We now know it's the same human across sessions, but nothing about who they are off-platform.
Unlocks Votes weigh ×3 on the leaderboard. The Spectator can claim a handle, publish Lists, and appear on the Predictor Leaderboard.
03
Connected, read-only
A founder connects Stripe Connect in read-only mode (via startups.studio), so the platform can see verified MRR without ever moving money.
Unlocks Verified-revenue affordance on the startup page. The startup transitions Ingested → Externally-Managed and back-Picks against it become resolvable.
04
Native flow
The startup runs its sales and payments through the platform's own primitives (sales-builder, startups.studio billing), not just a one-way connector.
Unlocks Full Claim surface on the founder profile, the path badge (craft / studio / mixed), and eligibility for the in-house tournaments.
05
Audited.
A third party (the human-judges layer, a co-investor, a public attestation) signs off on the numbers behind the startup.
Unlocks Eligibility for the highest-stakes leaderboards and any future real-money flows. The strongest provenance we surface.
We don't push you up the ladder. The chip on the vote buttons just shows where you already are. See your picks →