Production Readiness Scorecard
Ten questions. Five minutes. A clear read on whether your app is ready for its next hundred customers.
Built your product fast, maybe with a lot of help from AI? Good. That is how most great products start. This scorecard tells you how much of it is ready to carry a real business, and where to look first.
How to score
For each question, give yourself:
2 points if the answer is a confident yes.
1 point if it is partly true, or you think so but have not checked.
0 points if the answer is no, or you are not sure.
Add up your points at the end. The highest score is 20.
The ten questions
1. Secrets are out of the code. Passwords and API keys for your database, payments and email live in environment settings, not in the code, and none of them reach the browser.
2. Customers can only see their own data. You have tested logging in as two different people and confirmed neither can reach the other's records, even by changing a link.
3. Backups run on their own, and you have restored one. Your database is backed up automatically, and you have actually restored a backup to prove it works.
4. There is a safe place to test changes. You have a staging copy of the app where changes are tried before customers ever see them.
5. You find out about problems before customers do. Error tracking and uptime alerts tell you when something breaks.
6. The parts that touch money and personal data have tests. Payments, signups and anything private are covered by automated tests that run before every release.
7. Releases are boring. Shipping a change is a repeatable process anyone on the team can run, not a nervous afternoon.
8. You own your code and your data. Your code lives in a repository you control, and you could export your data tomorrow if you had to.
9. Someone besides the original builder can change it. A new engineer could read the code and make a change without fear of breaking something unrelated.
10. It can handle a busy day. You know roughly how many users the app can serve at once, and what would break first if that number doubled.
What your score means
16 to 20: Ready to grow. Your foundation is in good shape. Keep the habits that got you here and focus on the product.
10 to 15: Working, but fragile. The app does its job, and a few gaps could turn into a bad week. Fix the zeros first, starting with questions 1 to 3.
Under 10: At risk. The app proved the idea, which is a real win. It now needs reinforcement before it carries more customers. This is the most common score we see, and the most fixable.
Want a second opinion?
The scorecard tells you where to look. A systems audit tells you what we would fix first and in what order. Thirty minutes with Mike and Justin, the two founders of Cause of a Kind, free, whether you work with us or not.
Further reading: What We Find When We Open the Hood on an AI Built App and Rescue or Rebuild: How to Decide What to Do With a Vibe Coded App.