{ "schema_version": "1.2", "content_version": "2026-10-23", "last_reconciled": { "date": "2026-08-11", "against": [ "production Supabase state", "main branch runtime code", "public Pulse routes", "current commercial evidence" ], "governance": "docs/DOCUMENTATION_GOVERNANCE.md" }, "product": { "name": "Pulse by Fractionl", "index_name": "Fractional Working Index", "abbreviation": "FWI", "publisher": "Fractionl", "publisher_url": "https://fractionl.ai", "product_url": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai", "contact": "hello@krishraja.com" }, "canonical_strategy": "docs/CORPORATE_STRATEGY.md", "machine_contract_role": "Machine-readable mirror of the approved commercial and product truth. It does not override production readback or the canonical corporate strategy.", "one_liner": "Pulse is the independent market instrument for fractional leadership. It shows whether demand is expanding, which C-suite roles are moving, and how strong the evidence is.", "category": "Market intelligence and benchmarking for fractional leadership", "what_it_is": [ "A free public 0-100 composite of fractional-leadership market health", "An instrument recalculated after successful daily ingestion, with a weekly brief and seven-day role windows", "A transparent public distribution layer for readers, researchers, developers, and AI agents", "A future cross-partner benchmark, conditional on privacy-safe first-party engagement data" ], "what_it_is_not": [ "An adtech product", "A publisher or media intelligence product", "A job marketplace or lead-generation service", "Personal career coaching or individual rate advice", "An official, institutional, or government index", "A real-time, peer-reviewed, academically validated, or backtested forecast", "A paid generic API" ], "strategy": { "free_audience": [ "Fractional executives", "Companies considering a fractional leader", "Researchers and journalists", "Developers and AI agents" ], "primary_paying_icp": { "segment": "Specialist fractional-executive marketplace, staffing or placement firm, or multi-company talent collective", "geography": "United States and United Kingdom", "firmographics": [ "Approximately 5-50 staff or £1m-£30m annual revenue as a targeting heuristic, not a hard qualification gate", "At least 50 fractional or interim leadership engagements per year", "Places several C-suite functions", "Uses an ATS, CRM, marketplace, or structured engagement database", "Does not have an independent market-intelligence team", "Can contribute privacy-safe anonymised engagement data" ], "economic_buyer": [ "Founder", "CEO", "Managing director", "COO" ], "users": [ "Operations", "Research and insights", "Sales leadership", "Product" ], "pays_for": "A private benchmark of the firm's book against a verified, privacy-safe multi-partner cohort", "pains": [ "Cannot separate firm-specific pipeline weakness from market movement", "Prices rates, retainers, and fees from a small internal sample", "Sees role and geography changes after requisitions or placements move", "Lacks credible external evidence for client, board, and investor conversations", "Allocates executive supply with incomplete market context" ], "required_partner_fields": [ "Role", "Geography", "Engagement model", "Opened date", "Filled date", "Rate or fee band", "Expected and actual duration where known", "Agreed outcome marker" ] }, "secondary_paying_icp": { "segment": "Private-equity portfolio talent or operating team", "qualification": "Recurring interim or fractional leadership demand across at least ten portfolio companies", "status": "Later market, only after partner data supports relevant cohorts" }, "excluded_buyers": [ "Individual fractional executive", "Single-hire company", "Generic staffing firm without a meaningful fractional-leadership practice", "Adtech company or advertising buyer", "Publisher or media outlet", "Journalist or investor seeking a one-off statistic", "AI agent or developer seeking generic public data" ], "commercial_thesis": "The public instrument earns trust and distribution. The paid value is a proprietary cross-partner engagement benchmark, not a consumer paywall or a larger quota for the same public score.", "moat_metric": "Verified partner-contributed engagements in the trailing 12 months that pass schema, provenance, privacy, and quality checks and belong to a publishable cohort.", "cohort_rule": "Every displayed partner cohort must meet the approved minimum record count and contain data from at least three independent organisations. Exact suppression rules require legal and privacy review before ingestion." }, "positioning": { "public_promise": "Read the fractional leadership market like an instrument.", "partner_promise": "Benchmark your book against the market before your pipeline tells you too late.", "problem": "The fractional leadership market still runs on anecdotes.", "public_cta": "Read the market", "partner_cta": "Apply to become a Benchmark Partner", "partner_contact": "mailto:hello@krishraja.com?subject=Pulse%20Benchmark%20Partner" }, "coverage": { "roles": [ "Fractional CFO", "Fractional CMO", "Fractional CTO", "Fractional COO", "Fractional CRO", "Interim CEO" ], "geography": "Current role-demand collectors are United States scoped. English-language cultural inputs can include United Kingdom material but do not create a UK market benchmark. No APAC claim.", "pillars": { "demand": 0.5, "supply": 0.2, "culture": 0.3 }, "tracked_inputs": 20, "cadence": "DataForSEO Google Jobs tasks are prepared daily at 05:00 UTC. Vercel schedules the main ingest at 06:00 UTC daily and a Monday backstop at 06:00 UTC. Supabase also retains a Monday ingest backstop. The composite is recalculated after each successful ingest; the brief and role windows use a weekly context.", "history": "The public API exposes up to 12 months of mixed-frequency observations. Daily score rows accumulate from June 2026; full three-pillar coverage does not exist for the entire period.", "publisher_status": "A private composite published by Fractionl, not an official or government index", "tracked_inputs_note": "20 until 2026-10-25 (method v1). From 2026-10-26 (method v2) the composite uses 10 inputs, every one of which moves; 8 of the 20 never moved and a 9th sat at its normalizer floor, so they were retired at that seam. Two culture inputs (hn, wikipedia_pageviews) were replaced by corrected versions (trial_hn_wide, trial_wikipedia) and Google Trends returned rescored on its own history (trial_trends).", "composite_inputs_from_2026_10_26": [ "adzuna", "serpapi_jobs", "sec_edgar", "serpapi_linkedin", "census_bfs_pbs", "bls_incorporated", "newsapi", "trial_hn_wide", "trial_wikipedia", "trial_trends" ], "effective_independent_inputs": { "value": 4.4, "measured": "2026-10-23", "note": "Participation ratio of the input correlation matrix, constants excluded. Supersedes the 10.7 published from 2026-09-21, which counted inputs that never moved as independent." } }, "offers": { "public_instrument": { "price": "£0", "status": "live", "human_paywall": false, "includes": [ "Current FWI and components", "History and role-demand pages", "Weekly brief", "Public REST API and hosted MCP tools", "Methodology, completeness, and source health" ] }, "founding_benchmark_partner": { "price": "£1,500 for 90 days", "status": "application-only validation offer, maximum ten organisations", "price_status": "hypothesis, not transaction-validated", "eligibility": "Primary-ICP fit plus privacy, schema, and data-sharing review", "includes": [ "Data dictionary and quality assessment", "Private cohort prototype where coverage permits", "Benchmark review", "Pilot fee credited to the first annual plan" ] }, "benchmark_membership": { "price": "£6,000 per year", "status": "conditional, not generally available", "release_gate": "At least ten active partners, 500 verified trailing-12-month engagements, approved suppression rules, and safe cohorts", "price_status": "hypothesis, not transaction-validated", "includes": [ "Five seats", "Cohort dashboard", "Quarterly briefing", "CSV or API export of proprietary benchmark outputs" ], "ui_visibility": "Defined as a conditional strategy tier. It is not displayed as a live tier on the current pricing page." }, "enterprise_portfolio": { "price": "From £15,000 per year", "status": "conditional, not generally available", "release_gate": "At least 1,500 verified engagements and sufficient independent-partner coverage for requested cohorts", "price_status": "hypothesis, not transaction-validated", "includes": [ "Custom cohorts", "Embed rights", "Service level", "Up to 25 seats" ] } }, "validation": { "deadline": "2026-10-31", "targets": { "qualified_conversations": 25, "data_sharing_letters_of_intent": 10, "paid_pilots": 5, "pilot_price_gbp": 1500, "path_to_verified_records": 500 }, "stop_rule": "Reposition or stop the paid benchmark if fewer than five of 25 qualified firms pay, or if ten partners cannot collectively produce 500 usable records." }, "api": { "base_url": "https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1", "commercial_status": "The public REST API and MCP tools are free distribution surfaces. Optional API keys support operational rate controls, not a paid generic-data tier.", "auth": "No authentication for public read endpoints. Optional x-api-key support may apply rate controls.", "current": "https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/fwi-api/current", "history": "https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/fwi-api/history?months=N", "brief": "https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/export-brief", "role_indices": "https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/fwi-roles", "trigger_note": "POST /fwi-api/trigger is service-role only", "current_response_note": "meta.nextUpdate is a legacy weekly marker calculated as the next Sunday. Use meta.asOf and production schedule readback for freshness; do not treat nextUpdate as the next daily ingest time.", "ask_the_index": { "endpoint": "fwi-verdict", "status": "live, browser-origin restricted", "input_limit_characters": 280, "rate_limit": "12 requests per network-derived key per hour", "output": "Server-sent event stream with FACT, INTERPRETATION, and ACTION lines grounded in the current public FWI payload" } }, "live_product": { "public_routes": [ "/", "/fractional-cfo", "/fractional-cmo", "/fractional-cto", "/fractional-coo", "/fractional-cro", "/fractional-ceo", "/pricing", "/login", "/terms", "/privacy", "/answers" ], "instrument_views": [ "Index", "Your role", "Signals", "Interpretation", "Sources and methods", "Ask the Index" ], "authentication": "Optional Supabase email/password and Google OAuth account for role persistence and API-key management. Public market surfaces do not require an account.", "operational_api_keys": "Signed-in users may mint up to five active free keys. A free key is metered at 1,000 requests per day. Anonymous public reads remain unmetered.", "content_radar": "Live as public REST, RSS, and two MCP tools. It reports relative content-signal movement, not search volume or market demand. It is not a primary navigation surface in the current Pulse instrument.", "legacy_dormant": [ "Consumer subscription and Stripe tables and functions remain for compatibility", "The client Pro gate never locks a public surface", "Consumer checkout is not a current offer or route", "Waitlist and historical account rows do not validate a paid product" ], "answer_hub": "Static, prerendered question-and-answer pages at /answers/, built from content/answers/ in the repository. Not linked from the app navigation; listed in sitemap.xml, llms.txt, llms-full.txt and /answers/feed.xml. Answers never state a live reading; they explain how to read it from the API." }, "production_snapshot": { "captured_at": "2026-08-11", "volatile": true, "instruction": "Fetch the public API and source-health state for any current claim. This snapshot records the evidence used for documentation reconciliation and must not be treated as a permanently current reading.", "current_fwi": { "as_of": "2026-08-11", "overall": 51.4, "label": "Stable", "confidence": 0.81, "contributing_sources": 17 }, "source_health": { "configured_current_sources": 21, "failed": [ { "id": "gofractional", "last_success": "2026-07-03" } ], "healthy_but_stale_observations": [ { "id": "serpapi_trends", "days_stale": 12 }, { "id": "newsapi", "days_stale": 4 }, { "id": "serpapi_supply_trends", "days_stale": 7 } ] }, "history": { "score_rows": 206, "measured_supply_rows": 71, "unmeasured_supply_rows": 76, "simulated_supply_rows": 38 }, "active_supabase_crons": [ "pulse-prepare-dataforseo-jobs daily at 05:00 UTC", "weekly-fwi-ingest Monday at 06:00 UTC", "pulse-content-harvest Monday at 06:50 UTC", "pulse-content-brief Monday at 07:10 UTC" ] }, "not_live": [ "Partner engagement-data ingestion", "A production partner cohort dashboard", "Approved cohort suppression thresholds", "Automated partner-pilot billing or annual-plan checkout", "Webhook threshold alerts", "A generally available Benchmark Membership", "A generally available enterprise benchmark" ], "commercial_operations": { "primary_motion": "Founder-led, named-account validation", "pilot_transaction_path": "Application, qualification, data and privacy review, approved scope, signed agreement, and manual invoicing", "autonomous_agent_playbook": "docs/AUTONOMOUS_GTM_PLAYBOOK.md", "sales_playbook": "docs/SALES_PLAYBOOK.md", "agent_may": [ "research public information", "score prospects", "draft account briefs", "draft outreach", "prepare discovery and proposals", "recommend CRM stage with evidence" ], "agent_requires_separate_authority_for": [ "sending", "publishing", "sequence enrolment", "spend", "price changes", "CRM mutation", "uploading customer data", "issuing invoices", "contracting" ] }, "discovery": { "llms_txt": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/llms.txt", "ai_plugin": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/.well-known/ai-plugin.json", "hosted_mcp_server": "https://dtlcprcpvdomrehbejhw.supabase.co/functions/v1/mcp", "mcp_tools": [ "get_fractional_working_index", "get_fwi_weekly_brief", "get_content_radar", "get_content_brief" ], "role_pages": [ "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/fractional-cfo", "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/fractional-cmo", "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/fractional-cto", "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/fractional-coo", "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/fractional-cro", "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/fractional-ceo" ], "sitemap": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/sitemap.xml", "llms_full_txt": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/llms-full.txt", "answers_index": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/answers", "answers_feed": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/answers/feed.xml" }, "citation": { "cite_as": "Fractional Working Index (FWI), Pulse by Fractionl", "url": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai", "required_with_any_number": [ "score.overall", "score.band (from 2026-10-26)", "score.label", "meta.asOf" ], "recommended": [ "score.delta30d with score.delta30dComparedWith", "meta.dataCompleteness" ], "template": "Fractional Working Index (FWI), Pulse by Fractionl. [score.overall] of 100 (range [score.band.low] to [score.band.high]), [score.label], as of [meta.asOf]. Data completeness [meta.dataCompleteness]. https://pulse.fractionl.ai", "terms": "Free to read and cite with attribution. https://pulse.fractionl.ai/terms", "guide": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/methodology#how-to-cite-it", "bands": { "Surging": "75 and above", "Growing": "60 to 74", "Stable": "45 to 59", "Cooling": "30 to 44", "Contracting": "below 30" }, "rule": "Fetch the live reading before quoting; never reuse a number from memory or an older article.", "ready_made": "meta.citation in /fwi-api/current (from 2026-10-26)" }, "competitive_truth": { "named_competitor": "Go Fractional publishes free role, demand, and compensation benchmarks from its own platform and survey data.", "implication": "Do not claim Pulse is first or only. The paid thesis must be a privacy-safe, multi-partner engagement benchmark, not generic public role data." }, "do_not_say": [ "Do not describe adtech, advertising buyers, publishers, media, journalists, individual executives, or AI agents as the primary paying ICP.", "Do not pitch a consumer Pro plan or a generic metered API as the business model.", "Do not call conditional benchmark plans live or generally available.", "Do not call £1,500, £6,000, or £15,000 pricing validated until customers pay.", "Do not claim Pulse is the first, only, official, institutional, or government fractional index.", "Do not say no competitor exists. Go Fractional publishes free demand and compensation benchmarks.", "Do not claim years of uniform historical data.", "Do not claim peer review, academic validation, backtesting, or a predictive-accuracy percentage.", "Do not say real-time data or real-time market intelligence. Say recalculated after successful daily ingestion and interpreted through a weekly brief or seven-day role window.", "Do not claim coverage beyond the six listed C-suite roles or turn UK cultural material into a UK market benchmark. Current role-demand collectors are US-scoped.", "Do not publish a per-role supply score. Current role pages measure demand.", "Do not claim the Form D signal predicts demand until that relationship is validated.", "Do not use em dashes in user-facing copy.", "Do not describe the legacy consumer subscription, Stripe, checkout, or waitlist infrastructure as a current Pulse offer.", "Do not claim the Supabase daily ingest or deploy-hook crons are active. The production schedule must be read back before describing it.", "Do not say the index is validated against official statistics or tracks the labour market; as of 2026-10-23 it is not validated (see methodology.external_validation).", "Do not quote 10.7 effective independent inputs; it was a measurement error, corrected to 4.4 on 2026-10-23." ], "methodology": { "url": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/methodology", "changelog": "https://pulse.fractionl.ai/changelog", "owner": { "name": "Krish Raja", "organisation": "Fractionl", "corrections": "hello@krishraja.com" }, "current_method": "fwi-v2-2026-10-26", "seam": "2026-10-26", "precision": "From 2026-10-26 every reading is a whole number with a band (interquartile range of 500 seeded draws resampling each pillar's source votes). Earlier readings are kept as published, to one decimal.", "restatement_rule": "A method change takes effect from a dated seam and never restates a published reading. The series is chain-linked at 2026-10-26 with a fixed additive offset recorded on the changelog. Two June 2026 history edits predate this rule and are disclosed on the changelog.", "external_validation": { "status": "not validated", "as_of": "2026-10-23", "tests": [ { "anchor": "Indeed Hiring Lab postings (Accounting, Marketing, Software Development, Management)", "test": "weekly change in demand pillar, lag 0, pre-registered", "r": -0.53, "n": 18, "ci95": [ -0.8, -0.09 ], "result": "failed, opposite sign" }, { "anchor": "Census BFS high-propensity business applications, year over year", "test": "overall level, lag 0", "r": -0.04, "n": 18, "ci95": [ -0.5, 0.43 ], "result": "no relationship" }, { "anchor": "FRED initial jobless claims", "test": "weekly change in overall, lag 0, found by scanning 288 correlations", "r": 0.65, "n": 19, "ci95": [ 0.28, 0.85 ], "result": "exploratory, not claimed; out-of-sample retest from 2026-10-10" } ] } } }