Every Big Idea is run by me, Marty McCrea, in Austin, Texas. I hold a Master of Science in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business, and I started this company at 51. It has one product, The Signal, which scores a founder's idea across 10 dimensions using independent research on their market, buyers and competitors, measured against a rubric built on published research into why new businesses fail, and against the goal they set in their intake.
Marty McCrea
Founder, Every Big Idea
- MS in Technology Commercialization, UT Austin McCombs
- Winner, MSTC Venture Labs competition, with a venture that still did not make it
- BA in Organizational Communication
- 10+ years spotting next-generation ideas and helping refine them
Why I do this
Technology commercialization is the study of one question most people only guess at: can this new idea actually become a viable business? I spent a degree on that question, and then I tested it on myself.
During the MSTC program I started a venture called Vocal Media and won the school's Venture Labs competition with it. A win like that feels like proof. It was not. The venture did not make it, and that lesson taught me more about why ideas live or die than a success would have. Winning a pitch tells you an idea is well told. It does not tell you that a specific person, with a real budget, will pay for it instead of what they do today.
I started Every Big Idea at 51, and I am in a better position to start now than I was at 30 or 40. One belief drives it: every person deserves to have their idea heard, and to find out whether it is the real thing before they spend the year, not after.
What The Signal measures, and the research behind each dimension
Each of the ten dimensions tests a cause of startup failure, or a driver of success, documented in published research. That research includes founder post-mortems, Federal Reserve small-business survey data, US government business-survival data, and peer-reviewed work on founder track records. Every figure below names the group it describes.
Real pain
"No market need" was the top reason founders gave in 101 startup post-mortems collected by CB Insights (42%). In CB Insights' 2026 study of 431 venture-backed shutdowns, poor product-market fit was cited in 43% of those with a known cause.
Who pays
Steve Blank's earlyvangelist test: the first customers to build for have, or can quickly get, the money to buy a fix.
Willingness to pay
Blank's strongest buying signal is a problem that hurts enough that people have already cobbled together their own fix. That is what a top score on this dimension looks like.
Reachability
Among 6,525 US employer firms in the Federal Reserve's 2026 Report on Employer Firms, reaching customers and growing sales was the most commonly reported operational challenge.
Differentiation
Getting outcompeted was cited in 19% of the 101 founder post-mortems.
Feasibility for you
Running out of capital appears in 70% of the 2026 shutdowns, usually as the end result of another cause. In Startup Genome's 2012 study of about 3,200 startups, the 70% that scaled before proving demand grew about 20 times slower.
Timing and durability
In Bill Gross's Idealab analysis of about 200 companies, timing explained more of the gap between success and failure (42%) than team, idea, business model or funding. Bad timing or macro conditions appear in 29% of the 2026 shutdowns.
Economics
Unsustainable unit economics appear in 19% of the 2026 shutdowns. For subscription businesses, David Skok's benchmark is lifetime value above 3 times the cost to win a customer. Other models are judged on margin and the cost to win a customer.
Founder fit
In a Journal of Financial Economics study of venture-backed founders (Gompers, Kovner, Lerner and Scharfstein, 2010), founders with a prior success went on to succeed 30% of the time, versus 21% for first-time founders and 22% for those who had failed before.
Market size and headroom
This one is scored against your own goal. For side income or a full-time living, the bar is US Bureau of Labor Statistics survival data: about 80% of new US business establishments survive year one and about half reach year five. For a fundable company, the bar is higher: Shikhar Ghosh of Harvard Business School found about 75% of 2,000+ venture-backed companies never returned investors' capital.
A very low score on Real pain, Willingness to pay or Economics overrides a decent average. An idea with no real need, no one willing to pay, or no way to make money is not rescued by strong scores elsewhere.
What that research can and cannot tell you
Most startup-failure research covers venture-backed tech companies and founders explaining their own failures. Many of the people who use The Signal are solo founders and inventors. So the research shows which things matter. It does not give the odds for any one idea, and a score is not a probability: a 7 does not mean a 70% chance.
You will not see "90% of startups fail" on this site. Neither that line nor "95% of new products fail" has a solid primary source.
How I keep score on my own calls
I follow up every Signal at 6 and 12 months to check the calls against what actually happens: is the founder making money, still building or testing, working on a different version, paused, or stopped. Once enough Signals have a 12-month answer, the verdict lines get re-checked against those outcomes. Until then I do not claim the scoring has been proven accurate.
How a Signal gets made
The Signal is an expert-designed AI system: I built the rubric and the research process, the system runs the research, and every Signal is reviewed before it is delivered. It arrives digitally in 3 business days and costs $99, or $199 with a follow-up call. You can read two complete examples first: an invention worth building with changes and an idea worth reshaping.
How the guides on this site are written
- Every figure names its source and the group it describes.
- No invented statistics, reviews or testimonials.
- Patterns from real Signals are shared only in anonymized form: never a customer's name, idea, or identifying detail.
- Guides are updated when the evidence or The Signal changes, and each shows when it was last updated.
Start with how to validate a business idea before you build it, or score your own idea in 5 minutes.
Get in touch
Email marty@everybigidea.com, or find me on LinkedIn. Every Big Idea is operated by Synaptic Expansion Labs LLC, 5900 Balcones Drive, Ste 100, Austin, TX 78731.