Somebody pitches us something almost every week. A podcast format, a book idea, a brand that wants reinventing. We take on maybe one in ten. Not because the other nine are bad — most of them aren't — but because “not bad” was never the bar.
Here's the actual filter, which is duller than the pitch-deck version: we ask whether the idea still sounds good on the third telling. The first telling is always exciting; that's what pitches are for. The third is where you find out if there's a real idea underneath the enthusiasm, or just the enthusiasm.
A founder told me once that her show was “Serial, but for local politics.” Great sentence. Terrible answer, on its own, to the question of what the show actually does that nobody else does. We asked her to explain it again a week later without comparing it to anything else. What came back was sharper, smaller, and much more specific — and that's the version we ended up building.
Comparison is a tell, not a pitch
“It's X for Y” is useful shorthand and a bad foundation. If an idea can only be explained by pointing at something that already exists, it hasn't finished becoming itself yet. We don't reject those ideas outright. We just don't start building until the comparison falls away and something more particular is left standing.
That's slower than saying yes on the spot. It means good ideas sometimes leave and come back six months later, sharper, having sat with someone who kept asking the annoying question. We're fine with that. A project that survives being interrogated for six months tends to survive contact with an actual audience a lot better than one that didn't.
The other filter: can we actually finish it
Enthusiasm is not a production plan. We've turned down ideas we genuinely loved because nobody in the room — including us — had a credible answer to what episode twelve looks like, or chapter nine, or year two. A first episode is easy. A sustainable one is the entire job.
So the real question, underneath the interesting one, is boring on purpose: who does the work when it stops being fun, and what does the tenth week look like when the founder's energy alone isn't enough to carry it? If nobody can answer that specifically, we're not the right studio for it yet — and we'll say so.
The first telling of an idea is always exciting. The third is where you find out whether there's an idea underneath the excitement.
None of this makes us right more often than anyone else. It just means the projects that do get built here have already survived the part that kills most ideas quietly, before anyone even notices they're gone.