What is the Founder review on AskSami?

What the founder reads before writing

The founder opens one page for your product. It holds:

• Your product. Its name, its live address, and the name of the GitHub repository you connected, if you did.
• Your own answers. What it is and what it does, who it is for, where you are stuck, what makes yours different, who pays, how they buy, roughly what one customer pays a year and what you can spend on marketing. Each as you gave it, and left out where you skipped it.
• What you handed over. Your screenshots, your exports, your links and the files you gave outside a chat, and whether your signups and payments are tracked yet.
• Sami’s honest read. The whole of it, with its ranked plan, and every earlier read of the product.
• Who you are. Your name, your email address, your plan and where you came from when you signed up.

Never your chats with Sami. The founder does not see them, on any plan.

The founder reads all of that and writes the Founder review in the founder’s own words. There is no form to fill, no score to give and no set length, and no software writes a word of it. The founder can change it later: the new words replace the old on your tab, dated as updated and marked New again.

Where it appears, and how you are told

The Founder review stands on your Verdict tab, the tab your Project card opens, right under its head: the words From the founder, the founder’s name, the day it was released and, once the founder has changed it, the day it was updated. Sami’s honest read sits under it, exactly as Sami wrote it, and every later read Sami writes lands there too. Until the review is written, the tab says so in its place, with the time AskSami promises.

You are told four ways, and none of them is a line in Sami’s chat:

• A New mark on the review, for the account owner, until you have opened the tab.
• A black dot on your Project card in the sidebar, and on a phone on the button at the top left that opens it.
• A line from the founder in the Founder thread, the private thread between you and the founder on the same tab, saying the review is on your Verdict tab.
• One email when the founder writes in the thread: at most one an hour, to the account owner’s address. The switch is on your Account page, Email me when the founder writes, and it is on by default.

Under the review, one button, Write to the founder, opens the thread. What you write there, the founder reads and answers there, signed. Sami never writes in it.

How long it takes

Your product reaches the founder when your account pays, or, if you have not asked for your honest read by then, once Sami’s honest read of it is done. A product you add later reaches the founder the same way, once its honest read is done.

Most Founder reviews come within the first couple of hours and the majority within the first 24 hours, but allow up to 72 hours. That is the time AskSami promises in its Terms, for the Founder review, for a reply in the Founder thread and for the review of a public page, and it is the only time anyone gives: asked, Sami says the same and never a time of its own.

What it costs

Signing up is free, and so are your full honest read and your ranked plan. A plan adds more of Sami and a Founder review. The paid plans are Starter $20, Growth $100 and Max $240 per month, paid a month at a time with no contract.

Free is Sami: your honest read, your ranked plan and chat with Sami and Sami Sinchi on a small monthly allowance, and no founder. Starter, at $20 per month, brings the founder in, and every plan above it has everything in Starter. Starter’s card adds, on top of everything in Free:

• A Founder review of your product
• Talk to the founder in your page
• Your public page on AskSami
• Sami Amaru
• Reading again whenever you ship
• A full monthly allowance

What to do next: sign up free, get your honest read, and when you want a person’s eyes on your product too, pick a plan on your Account page. The pricing on the home page lists what each plan holds.

What happens when you cancel

You cancel on your Account page, and the plan stops at the end of the period you have paid for. From that day the account is on Free. The Founder review leaves your Verdict tab, and one line stands in its place, saying the Founder review comes with Starter and up, with Reopen the plan beside it. Your Founder thread closes, with nothing in it lost. Your projects, Sami’s memory, your reads, your chats and your public product page stay. Reopen the plan and the review and the thread come back as they were.

What it is not

• Not a call, and not a session. The founder writes to you and answers you in your page, in writing. There is nothing to book and nobody waiting for you.
• Not mentoring. One written review of each product, and a thread to talk it over in. For sessions with a person, a mentor marketplace is built for that: AskSami or GrowthMentor says when that is the better pick.
• Not public. The review is on your Verdict tab, for the people on your account and the founder, and nowhere else. Your public product page never shows a read, a verdict or a score, and the founder never publishes a word you did not send. Products on AskSami lists every page that is live.
• Not a score. Sami’s honest read scores six things. The Founder review scores nothing: it is written.
• Not a promise of customers. Nobody can promise those. The founder tells you what one person who has been through it sees in your product, and what you do with that is yours to decide.