The B2B rules

Every constant this machine runs - the clocks, the bars, the caps, the shields - is a hypothesis, not a law. This is not one rule among the rules; it is the rule about the rules, and it governs how any of them ever changes. 1. The trigger is published before the change. The gauges that read the constants run on /pulse; the triggers are stated on /balance before any firing - the fail-safe, the tripwire, the inflation guard. A constant never changes because someone discretioned it: the change follows a published trigger, measured in public. 2. The change ships as a versioned rulebook revision. The outgoing book is snapshotted - immutable, served forever at /rules/v/[rev] - and the new book is the next version, registered with its reason and its date. It applies only to tenures that start after it: never mid-tenure, never retroactive. 3. The words re-check before the version ships. Every guide and page that cites a changed constant is re-verified against the new text before the revision lands - the citation test proves a rule number exists; the words must also say what the rule now says. A version that ships with stale words behind it is a lie with a number on it. 4. The change is recorded where everything is: /trail carries it with its rule cited, like every state change this machine has ever made. 5. Two non-policies, stated so nobody proposes them in a panic: no mid-tenure extensions, and no lowering of the graduation bars. The rate is tuned by giving founders enough runway, never by moving the finish line - an easy wall is an empty credential, and the wall only carries weight because 25 verified joiners or one signed pilot actually happened. The full machine specification, written in Simplified Technical English, is public at /spec.

Sixteen SaaS verticals, one chair each. Only the seated startup may publish a pilot offer. Attention is the scarce resource on this board, and it is rationed. Each product files under exactly one primary category - the market it races in. Tags may describe the product, but only the primary category creates a seat, a queue position, or duel eligibility: the machine races the market, never the tags, and category-shopping is a dead end. Related entities and substantially identical products are treated as one participant - a moderator determination, recorded in the audit trail.

Accept one pilot and your tenure ends - you graduate to the Alumni Wall with your record intact, permanent and in public. The seats are for startups still hunting pilot number one; the wall is where everyone who found theirs stays, forever.

When a seat opens, the entry at the front of that category’s queue is seated automatically. No votes, no favors - the only entries that wait are duel participants still inside their cooldown (R-08), and the only ones that skip the line are duel winners (R-05), who earned it in public. A cooling duelist waits behind anyone who files while their window runs - the back is the back.

A freshly seated startup cannot be challenged for 72 hours - time to publish terms and court a pilot. And a seat that just defended a CONTESTED duel gets seven days of the same: when the challenger drew at least twenty votes, the duel was a fight, not a formality, and the holder has earned a week to actually run the offer. A duel nobody showed up for keeps the seat (R-06) but grants no shield - breathing room is earned by demand, never manufactured by an empty duel.

Every tenure is capped at twenty-five days - the countdown is public on the board row. Land a pilot and graduate early, with honor; run out the clock and the seat rotates: no shame, no flag, refile free. No extensions - the clock is the clock, and the queue is the mercy. A duel still open when the clock runs out closes with no winner - the clock is not demand - the challenger keeps their place in line, and the seat goes to the queue.

Outreach is not advantage. A moderator may mint a claim link addressed to one founder, carrying a pre-filled listing; the founder signs in with the invited address, edits anything, and pushes - and the push is an ordinary filing: back of the queue like everyone (R-03), terms frozen at seating (R-09), free forever (R-18). One claim per link, one link per founder, links expire. No unclaimed listing is ever shown on the board - nothing exists until the founder files it.

Any startup may challenge the seat holder. First to 100 community votes takes the seat; the beaten challenger goes to the back of the queue, and the dethroned holder's return follows the fight - contested to the front, surrendered to the back (R-08). If the holder accepts a qualifying pilot mid-duel, the holder graduates (R-02/R-11) and the duel closes without a winner - the challenger keeps their place in line and the seat goes to the queue (R-03). Graduation makes a seat vacant; it does not make the challenger the winner.

If nobody reaches 100 within seven days, the higher count wins. If the counts are tied, overtime: the next vote takes the seat. Overtime lasts one day - a tie nobody breaks in twenty-four hours keeps the holder seated.

Votes are deduplicated by device - or by account when you're signed in - and no account is required: a spectator's vote is a vote. A founder's own vote in their duel is refused where the machine can see it's them, and no single connection weighs more than two votes in a duel either way. A team is not something the machine can name; coordinated voting is a conduct matter (R-12), not a turnstile. Both counts stay public and live - that transparency is the real enforcement.

The beaten challenger rejoins at the back of the queue - winning is placement, not a queue reward, and losing is the back. The dethroned holder's return follows the fight they put up: a CONTESTED loss - the holder's own demand reached the shield line (R-04) and the seat changed hands in a real fight - rejoins at the FRONT of the queue: they waited their turn once, they defended the chair, and the market's answer was a fight, not a walkover. A chair surrendered without a fight - the holder under the shield line - rejoins at the back: a seat given up without demand proves nothing, the same line the tied overtime reads. The trade stays closed: a friendly flip costs the challenger's win, and nobody gains queue placement by losing on purpose. The 7-day cooldown still stands: no re-challenging the same seat, no ping-pong. Losing hurts. That is the point.

Scope, duration and cost are published before seating and cannot change mid-tenure. Rewrite the deal and you rejoin the back of the queue.

Seat holders respond to any claim within five days - accept, decline, or negotiate. The window counts calendar days, not business ones: a Friday claim is answered by Wednesday. Silence is a violation of R-13.

One acceptance ends your tenure, so choose the partner you can genuinely serve; your seat opens the moment you sign. A pilot, for these purposes, is an agreement with a customer organization independent of the founder, represented by an identifiable person, under the published terms (R-09). Only a QUALIFYING claim can be accepted: the claimant confirmed their email and writes from a company address (R-16) - the machine checks the claim’s form. Independence and identity are the standard, policed by flags (R-17) and appeals (R-49), never satisfied by the founder’s own word. Every claim is still delivered (R-15) and may be negotiated or declined - but an unconfirmed or personal-email claim is interest, not a signature, and it cannot end a tenure.

The machine holds the line it can count - one vote per person per duel (R-07), and no single connection weighing more than two. Beyond that, intent is not countable; the live public counts are the real police, and we read what everyone reads. Where vote-buying is shown to our satisfaction, the domain may sit out ninety days - on the record, each time. We try; we don't pretend the trawl is perfect.

No published terms, or letting the answer window close - five days of silence toward a claimer (R-10) - and the seat reverts to the queue. The machine counts calendar days: a Friday claim is answered by Wednesday.

Alumni keep their listing, logo, tag and link for life. A genuinely new product may enter a different category after review; the same product never re-enters. The machine refuses a name the board has already had; anything subtler is a human's recorded call, made rarely.

A founder may put one move on the record: a public commitment with a date, seven or thirty days out, shown on their page for anyone watching. One clock runs at a time - settle the one you have before the next can start. When the clock runs out the founder answers: it landed, it didn't, or it's called off - and if no answer comes, the silence is what the record shows. A clock is a record, not proof: it never graduates anyone, moves a seat, or counts toward one - a plan is not a pilot (R-11).

A claim is one step - name, email, one line - and it reaches the founder instantly. No DNS records, no meta tags, no waiting rooms, ever. An optional one-click email confirmation upgrades trust; until then, the claim is delivered anyway.

Founders see signals, not walls: COMPANY EMAIL, DOMAIN MATCH, CONFIRMED. Personal-email claims are delivered too - clearly marked, one open claim per person. Founders decline with one click. And the one claim that never arrives is your own: a founder claiming their own seat is rejected outright - a pilot is signed by a customer, not the founder, and self-claims are the oldest trick on any board.

Competitor fishing and fake companies get flagged by founders - one click. Three strikes and the domain goes to moderator review: the machine never benches on its own, because flags are filed by one side of a dispute and a bench is ninety days. A moderator who looked at the flagged claims decides - bench, or clear. Strikes land on domains the claimant controls: a free mailbox is its provider's, not theirs - flags on free-mail claims are recorded, and those claims can never graduate anyone (R-11), but the mailbox never sits for them. Silent rate limits keep founder inboxes clean; honest people never see them.

No product, fee, sponsor, or subscription may alter seat state, queue order, vote counting, claim delivery, or a founder’s standing. Paid products live only in alumni-space (post-tenure), service-space (human labor), and data-space (aggregates). Seats are never sold. Equity is never taken. Filing and claiming are free, forever.

Sponsored placements run beside the board, never inside it - the side rails on wide desktop (four slots per side), the same sponsors in the top and bottom strips on smaller screens, and one labelled line in the weekly digest. Every slot walks its surface's full list on the same eight-second clock - no sponsor can buy position, frequency, or proximity to a seat; airtime is identical for everyone on a surface. The right rail is the founding cohort: the first five sponsors ever at each placement, a one-time cap, who lock the launch rate for as long as they keep renewing. After the founding five the rate steps up - later sponsors pay the rate set when they book, and it keeps rising as the rail's twenty slots fill. Until the cohort has fully filled, founding sponsors rotate on both sides - buying early can never cost half the airtime. After it fills, the left rail opens to market-rate sponsors (uncapped), and a founding sponsor who lets their slot go does not reopen it: their replacement buys at market. Placements are labeled, link out with rel=”sponsored”, and are page chrome, never content - nothing sponsored appears inside the board, a queue, a duel, or a claim. Money buys placement space and nothing else (see R-18).

Every number on the proof ladder wears how it is known: ATTESTED (the founder's own report - shown, labelled, never hidden), MACHINE (what the board itself observed: the join requests it mailed codes for, the seats its codes verified, and payments that arrived signature-verified from the founder's own Stripe webhook - the only machine source for PAYING), and AUDITED (the member's own answer, recorded whether or not it flatters the founder). Founders may attest anything from the console; the machine never upgrades an attestation, it only adds its own observations beside it. A signature-verified tier cannot be bought, asked for, or granted by hand - it is earned by wiring the webhook and observed from then on. No product, fee, or sponsor may alter a tier.

Every verified cohort member's code is a join link. The credit fires exactly when the referred joiner verifies their emailed code - the code is the verification (R-21), never the click. The referrer must hold a verified seat on the same roster; a founder is never the referrer, a self-referral never credits, and one canonical email is one member (R-16 canonicalization). Marks are earned and rendered by member code: an erasure (R-51) keeps the count and drops the person. Claim-side arrival tags are study data on /pulse, never seat state - the thirty-second claim never grows a field for them.

Every state change on your record can be appealed from the console within seventy-two hours. The appeal asks one question - was the rule applied correctly? - never whether you deserve better; a machine that answers the second question stops being a machine. A human reviews the same evidence the machine saw and answers publicly; the filing and the verdict both land in the audit trail. If the rule was misapplied, it is corrected. If the rule was right but the rule itself is wrong, the rule changes - for everyone, in the next revision, never just for you.

When the machine's actual behavior contradicts a published rule because of a defect, that is not a decision under R-49 - there is no judgment to appeal, only a fact to correct. Affected state is corrected to what the rule actually required, logged publicly as a defect correction, never as an appeal outcome. Where exact correction is no longer possible - the seat has already been claimed by someone else in the meantime - the affected founder is requeued at the front of their category with a seven-day challenge shield, the same immunity a fresh filing earns (R-04), so the defect costs them position, never the seat itself. The remedy is stated here, fixed for every case, not decided one founder at a time after the fact.

“The wall is forever” (R-14) and permanent roster positions (R-21) protect the proof - that a seat was held, when, and how it graduated. They do not protect personal data beyond what the law requires. Where the law entitles someone to it, a founder or cohort member may request removal of their identifying details - name, email, anything that points to them specifically. What stays is the anonymized fact: category, dates, evidence tier, outcome. The record does not disappear; the name on it can. A cohort's historical size is frozen at graduation and never recomputed - erasure changes who was there, not what the record already says. A member of a cohort whose outcome is not yet decided may have identity fields removed at once, but the roster row stands until the contest resolves - holding a public contest honest is a legitimate interest, and it ends with the tenure clock. Enforcement records - flags, benches, ban history (R-12, R-17) - are retained on the machine's integrity grounds and are not erased by request; a request that touches one is decided by a human, in writing, with reasons. Every granted erasure is logged in the audit trail as a privacy event citing this rule: the removal itself becomes part of the permanent record.