Draft Stonk ICP Alignment - Confirmed
Confirmed approval record for $icp. Output path: alignment/icp-draft-stonk.html.
Summary
Confirmed primary ICP: finance-curious social retail players.
Approval result: canonical files were approved for the flat research/ path, with retail B2C ranked above college clubs and real-prize competitors mentioned only as risk evidence.
Canonical outputs: research/icp.md and research/icp-search-log.md. No research/.progress.yaml or task files were approved by the file-change gate.
The Stage 2 preview below is preserved as the review record. The approval gates supersede preview sections that recommended college clubs as primary.
Approval Record
alignment_page: "alignment/icp-draft-stonk.html"
approval_status: ready-for-agent-review
gate_answers:
- section: "Scope Resolution"
gate_type: "artifact-destination"
status: "answered"
answer: "Use flat research/ path"
target_path: "research/icp.md"
- section: "ICP Candidates"
gate_type: "candidate-verdict"
status: "answered"
answer: "Finance-curious social retail players"
target_path: "research/icp.md"
- section: "Scoring Matrix"
gate_type: "assumptions-confidence"
status: "answered"
answer: "Retail B2C should rank above college clubs"
target_path: "research/icp.md"
- section: "Evidence Matrix"
gate_type: "evidence-coverage"
status: "answered"
answer: "Evidence is sufficient for initial ICP artifact"
target_path: "research/icp-search-log.md"
- section: "Recommended Path And File Changes"
gate_type: "proposed-file-changes"
status: "answered"
answer: "Approve research/icp.md and research/icp-search-log.md only"
target_path: "research/icp.md"
- section: "Approval Gates"
gate_type: "scope-non-goals"
status: "answered"
answer: "Mention real-prize competitors only as risk evidence"
target_path: "research/icp.md"
- section: "Approval Gates"
gate_type: "coverage-checkpoint"
status: "answered"
answer: "Approved to write canonical artifacts"
target_path: "research/icp.md"
section_feedback:
[]
Scope Resolution
Product Path
No active research/, specs/, or tasks/ directory exists after the reset. No research/.progress.yaml manifest exists. The run is therefore in flat single-product mode.
Active Inputs
Active source files are README.md, concept.md, desk-flip-report.md, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and .agents/project.json.
Archived Evidence
The old app, old research, old specs, and old task plans are archived under archive/2026-06-01-104829/. They are used only as historical evidence, not active requirements.
Business Model Classification
Primary current classification: B2B2C community-led wedge over a B2C game. Secondary classifications: B2C PLG/community-led and education-adjacent. Real-money contests, paid entry fees, cash prizes, brokerage links, and investment-advice framing remain out of scope.
Scope Gate
The default recommendation is to write flat files under research/ because there is one active product concept and no active product-path manifest.
Required Question
Which artifact destination should be used after approval?
ICP Candidates
1. College Finance And Investment Clubs
Recommended primaryB2B2C
Club officers need recurring, credible, low-friction ways to make market discussion participatory. Members want competition and practice without needing real money. Evidence includes active 2026 stock pitch and portfolio competitions, identifiable clubs, public deadlines, team formats, and prize pools.
Core pain: formal pitch competitions and paper trading are useful but can be slow, intimidating, or organizer-heavy for casual participation.
2. Finance-Curious Social Retail Players
B2CLarge market
Young retail investors and finance-curious users learn through social media, friends, family, search, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and mobile apps. They have frequent market-opinion triggers, but their willingness-to-pay and repeat behavior for a standalone fantasy stock game are less directly evidenced.
Core pain: social market opinions are common, but group chats and brokerage watchlists do not settle bragging rights.
3. Fantasy Sports Friend Groups
B2C socialMetaphor fit
Fantasy players already understand drafts, standings, leagues, and social rituals. The audience is huge and culturally aligned with "fantasy football, but for stocks." The missing evidence is stock-interest overlap and non-seasonal retention.
Core pain: they understand the game format instantly, but may not care enough about stocks without a market-story trigger.
4. Finance Creators And Community Operators
Partner-ledHigher risk
Creators, Discord operators, and newsletters need ways to turn opinions into engagement. This segment has distribution leverage but creates higher trust, moderation, and investment-advice risk before the product has guardrails.
Core pain: engagement is scattered across posts, Discord threads, watchlists, and claims that are hard to verify.
5. Personal Finance And Economics Educators
EducationDeferred
Educators already use stock market simulations to teach finance and economics. This validates learn-by-doing demand, but existing incumbents are curriculum-rich and the product would need school procurement, privacy, and standards alignment.
Core pain: teachers want engagement and safe practice, but this is a different product and sales motion.
Candidate Gate
The recommendation is to select college finance/investment clubs as the initial ICP while preserving the broad B2C consumer as the mass-market expansion hypothesis.
Required Question
Which primary ICP should the canonical research artifact use?
Scoring Matrix
| ICP Candidate | Pain Intensity | WTP Quality | Accessibility | Evidence Strength | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| College finance and investment clubs | 4.2/5 - recurring need for events, member engagement, and accessible stock-picking activities. | 4.0/5 - public prize pools, team formats, sponsored events, and existing simulation usage show budget or organizer-energy proxies. | 4.6/5 - clubs and competitions are named, searchable, and calendar-driven. | Medium-high | Best primary ICP for first research artifact. |
| Finance-curious social retail players | 4.0/5 - strong market-opinion and social-learning signals. | 2.2/5 - active spend is unclear; behavior skews free/social/mobile. | 3.0/5 - large but diffuse; platform algorithms and communities are hard to reach without product proof. | Medium | Best mass-market expansion audience, weaker first wedge. |
| Fantasy sports friend groups | 3.7/5 - draft and standings behavior is proven; stock interest is inferred. | 3.0/5 - fantasy players spend on rituals and leagues, but not necessarily stock games. | 3.2/5 - large audience, seasonal access around fantasy football. | Medium | Strong positioning frame, not enough stock-specific evidence to lead. |
| Finance creators and community operators | 3.8/5 - engagement and proof-of-track-record pain is real. | 3.5/5 - communities and creators monetize, but partner access and trust risk are high. | 2.3/5 - relationship-driven and compliance-sensitive. | Low-medium | Defer until guardrails are stronger. |
| Personal finance and economics educators | 3.5/5 - engagement need is validated. | 4.0/5 - institutions pay or partner for curriculum/simulation programs. | 2.5/5 - longer procurement, FERPA/COPPA/privacy needs, standards alignment. | Medium-high | Different product surface; not the fresh-start ICP. |
Staff-engineer challenge: the most elegant ICP choice is not the broadest market. It is the segment where the product can get repeated, observable use fastest without inventing a new behavior. College clubs already create stock-picking rituals; Draft Stonk would need to prove it makes those rituals easier and more fun, not invent demand from scratch.
Scoring Gate
The scoring distinguishes pain from WTP. Retail players have high pain/opportunity but weak WTP evidence. Clubs have narrower reach but stronger access and budget/effort proxies.
Required Question
Does the scoring overweight or underweight any segment?
Proposed research/icp.md Content
This is the proposed canonical artifact content, excluding the final ## Next Steps section until approval because the pre-approval gate forbids downstream routing language.
Title And Classification
Draft Stonk ICP Research
Primary ICP: U.S. college finance and investment club officers, plus active student members, who need a low-friction way to turn market opinions into a competitive, non-advisory activity for meetings, recruiting, and member engagement.
Business model classification: B2B2C community-led wedge into a B2C fantasy stock game. The club officer or student leader is the initial customer/organizer, while club members are the daily users. The broader consumer path remains B2C community-led PLG. Education-adjacent opportunities exist but should remain distinct from the first ICP because they introduce curriculum, privacy, procurement, and standards requirements.
Customer Profile
The primary customer is a student officer, investment-club board member, finance society leader, or highly active member at a U.S. college or university. They organize meetings, competitions, workshops, recruiting events, and market discussions. They need formats that help beginners participate without requiring formal valuation work, real-money trading, or investment recommendations.
The buyer/user relationship is mixed. The organizer decides whether to use a game format in a meeting or event. The daily users are members who want to make a pick, compete, learn by doing, and compare outcomes with peers. The product must therefore satisfy the organizer's need for credibility and low setup while giving members a fast, social payoff.
Geographic focus: United States first. The active concept uses U.S. public equities, U.S. college clubs are easily identifiable, and U.S. securities-advice constraints make the no-prize/no-advice posture important from day one.
Named accounts that fit: Notre Dame Investment Club; University of South Florida Investment Club; Boulevard Investment Group at SMU; UC Irvine Investment and Trading Group; Georgetown Undergraduate Stock Pitch Competition; University of Georgia Student Managed Investment Fund; University of Cincinnati Lindner Investment Challenge; UChicago Blue Chips Investment Club; Wharton Undergraduate Finance Club; student finance clubs using The Stock Market Game or Investopedia-style simulators.
Business Model and Go-to-Market Motion: B2B2C community-led, with a self-serve game experience for student members. The motion should be treated as organizer-led discovery, not enterprise sales. This artifact does not recommend pricing or packaging.
User Profile(s)
Organizer user: officer or active member responsible for planning a club meeting, recruiting event, market challenge, or beginner-friendly activity. They are likely finance-interested and comfortable with tickers, but they may not want to teach a full valuation lesson for every activity.
Participant user: student member who wants a lighter-weight way to test market instincts. They may be a beginner, a finance major, a fantasy sports player, a Reddit/TikTok finance consumer, or someone preparing for a more formal pitch competition.
Adjacent user: faculty advisor or school-affiliated sponsor who cares about framing, disclaimers, privacy, and whether the activity looks like a game rather than trading advice.
Trigger Events
- Semester kickoff and recruiting: clubs need accessible events for new members before formal stock-pitch work begins.
- Meeting programming gaps: officers need repeatable activities when there is no guest speaker or prepared pitch.
- Market headlines: earnings, AI stocks, meme-stock moves, IPOs, rate decisions, and selloffs create quick "who called it?" moments.
- Competition prep: students preparing for stock pitch or portfolio competitions need lower-pressure practice.
- Fantasy sports draft season: draft language is culturally salient and can make the metaphor easier to explain.
Frequency and urgency are highest around semester calendars, recruiting, recurring meetings, and major market-news weeks. Those triggers are more predictable than general consumer market curiosity.
Current State Journey
- An officer needs an activity or a member wants to turn a market take into a challenge.
- The group currently uses a stock pitch format, paper-trading contest, spreadsheet, Investopedia-style simulator, group chat, Discord thread, or informal debate.
- Beginners face friction: they may not know valuation, trade mechanics, or why share price alone is not a fair comparison.
- Existing simulations often ask users to manage a virtual portfolio, which is slower and more trading-like than a quick game.
- Formal competitions require slides, deadlines, judging, and sometimes professional panels.
- Casual stock claims disappear unless someone creates rules, records picks, prevents duplicates, and tracks returns.
- The organizer either spends time creating structure manually or defaults to a more passive meeting format.
Pain Map
High severity, high frequency: organizers need repeatable member-engagement activities; beginners need a low-pressure way to participate; current alternatives are either too formal, too slow, or too brokerage-like; stock opinions are easy to make but hard to settle fairly.
Medium severity, high frequency: clubs need an activity that works on mobile; students need company-name and ticker support; officers need language that avoids advice and real-money implications.
High severity, lower frequency: cash prizes, paid entry fees, creator-hosted public challenges, or buy/sell language can create securities-law, gambling-law, trust, and school-compliance risk.
Current Alternatives (User Perspective)
- Stock pitch competitions: credible and career-relevant, but formal, time-consuming, and intimidating for beginners.
- Paper-trading simulators: useful for practice, but they often feel like virtual brokerage accounts rather than social games.
- The Stock Market Game and classroom products: strong for education, but curriculum-oriented and not optimized for fast club-night entertainment.
- Spreadsheets and group chats: flexible, but require manual rules, tracking, and reminders.
- Fantasy stock apps: validate the category, but many emphasize portfolios, weekly challenges, cash prizes, or trading-style mechanics rather than a simple draft-night loop.
Market Sizing
TAM, top-down: large adjacent markets exist: FSGA reports 62.5 million fantasy sports players in the U.S. and Canada in 2022, and FINRA/CFA report that 56 percent of U.S. Gen Z ages 18 to 25 owned at least one investment. SIFMA Foundation reports nearly 20 million students served by The Stock Market Game since 1977, validating broad stock-simulation education demand.
SAM, bottom-up: the near-term reachable market is U.S. college finance clubs, investment clubs, student-managed funds, finance societies, and business clubs that run recurring meetings, competitions, or paper-trading activities. Public competition pages show teams, deadlines, and prize pools, making this segment more discoverable than a diffuse consumer audience.
SOM, early: a realistic first obtainable market is a small set of club pilots across universities where officers can run a draft-style stock challenge in a meeting and observe whether members replay, share, or request another round.
Confidence: medium. Adjacent demand and access are strong; the specific willingness to use a fantasy stock draft instead of formal pitch or portfolio competition remains unvalidated.
Stated Value Drivers
What matters in this segment is not professional-grade stock research. The value driver is making market curiosity participatory. The "aha" moment is a member seeing that their stock pick has been captured, compared fairly, and turned into a scoreboard without needing a brokerage account, real money, or a formal pitch deck.
Likely customer language: "We need an activity new members can actually join"; "paper trading takes too much setup"; "stock pitches are intimidating"; "we need something fun for a meeting"; "we want people talking about markets without telling anyone what to buy."
Willingness-To-Pay Signals
- Paid alternatives and budget proxies: public college competitions show prize pools and sponsor involvement; education simulations have institutional funding; fantasy sports players spend on league rituals. These are proxies, not direct Draft Stonk pricing evidence.
- Budget owner/context: club officers, student funds, finance departments, sponsors, or event organizers may control event budgets. For early discovery, organizer time and event scarcity are stronger signals than software budget.
- Time-cost proxy: officers spend time arranging meetings, tracking competitions, collecting submissions, and creating rules.
- Switching-cost tolerance: switching is plausible for casual club activities but lower for formal competitions tied to sponsors, judges, or curriculum.
- Economic urgency: moderate. The urgency is engagement and recruiting quality, not direct revenue.
- Price sensitivity cues: students and clubs likely expect low or free access unless sponsored by a department, competition, or partner.
Customer ↔ User Dynamics
The organizer needs trust, ease, and clear non-advisory framing. The participant needs speed, competition, and enough stock context to make a pick. If the organizer experience is heavy, the game will not be used in meetings. If the participant experience feels like homework or brokerage software, the game will lose the casual users who make the group dynamic work.
Post-adoption dynamics are cohort-based. A successful first session can create replay pressure, rematches, and recurring meeting use. A failed session likely dies quickly because the organizer has many other meeting formats available.
Discovery & Evaluation Behavior
Club officers discover tools through peer clubs, finance society networks, school events, advisors, LinkedIn, Discord, Reddit, existing simulators, and search. They evaluate based on how quickly members understand the activity, whether it feels credible, whether it avoids advice/prize risk, whether it works on mobile, and whether it creates visible participation during a meeting.
This segment chooses tools by trying them in a low-risk meeting or pilot. The best evaluation behavior to validate is whether officers can recruit members into a first draft without a long explanation and whether members ask to replay.
Additional ICPs
Finance-Curious Social Retail Players
Customer/user: young retail investors, finance-curious consumers, and social-media-informed market watchers. Pain: they see and share market opinions but lack a low-risk scoreboard for bragging rights. Alternatives: brokerage watchlists, screenshots, paper trading, Reddit/TikTok debates, fantasy stock games. Market size: large, supported by FINRA/CFA, NFCS, and YouGov social-investing evidence. WTP: weak until repeat behavior is proven. Verdict: strongest mass-market expansion hypothesis, but not the best first wedge.
Fantasy Sports Friend Groups
Customer/user: groups that already run drafts, league chats, punishments, and standings. Pain: fantasy sports rituals are proven, but there is no simple stock equivalent for casual groups. Alternatives: fantasy sports platforms, office pools, group chats, informal challenges. Market size: large adjacent audience via FSGA. WTP: fantasy players spend on rituals, but stock interest overlap is unproven. Verdict: excellent positioning language and seasonal channel, secondary ICP.
Finance Creators And Community Operators
Customer/user: newsletter writers, TikTok/YouTube finance creators, Discord admins, stock-community operators. Pain: they need engagement mechanics and proof of picks without advice framing. Alternatives: Discord calls, watchlists, polls, leaderboards, portfolio screenshots, community sentiment tools. Market size: high upside, hard to quantify. WTP: stronger than consumers if the product drives engagement, but trust and compliance risk are high. Verdict: defer until non-advisory guardrails and moderation assumptions are proven.
Personal Finance And Economics Educators
Customer/user: teachers, curriculum coordinators, afterschool programs, and financial-literacy organizations. Pain: they need engaging simulations that teach finance safely. Alternatives: The Stock Market Game, Rapunzl, StockTrak, PersonalFinanceLab, classroom simulators. Market size and WTP: validated by established programs. Verdict: distinct product path because procurement, privacy, curriculum, and standards are central.
Cross-ICP Analysis
Shared pains: users want low-risk practice, visible comparison, and a reason to care about market movement. Organizers and communities need participation mechanics that avoid real-money exposure and investment advice.
Conflicts: clubs value credibility and repeatable event use; fantasy friend groups value speed and social energy; creators value engagement and distribution; educators value curriculum and privacy. One product story cannot credibly satisfy all four at launch.
Prioritization: start research and prototype validation with college finance/investment clubs because access and event triggers are strongest. Preserve finance-curious retail and fantasy sports audiences as positioning tests. Defer creators and educators until compliance, trust, and product-surface assumptions are clearer.
Build sequence rationale, in problem-space terms: validate whether a club setting can produce fast comprehension, participation, replay intent, and share/invite behavior. If that fails, broad B2C will likely be harder because it has less structure and weaker urgency.
Discovery and evaluation comparison: clubs evaluate through meetings and pilots; retail players evaluate through immediate fun and shareability; fantasy groups evaluate through familiarity and group adoption; creators evaluate through audience engagement and reputation risk; educators evaluate through standards, privacy, and learning outcomes.
Signals For Downstream Research
- Competitive analysis should separate casual fantasy stock games from curriculum simulations, formal stock pitch competitions, and real-prize fantasy trading contests.
- Positioning should test whether "fantasy football, but for stocks" works better for clubs or for fantasy-sports friend groups.
- Monetization research should treat prize pools, event budgets, club sponsorship, and free student expectations as evidence, not pricing guidance.
- Lifecycle research should map the officer-member relationship separately from the participant game loop.
- Compliance research should preserve no real-money, no prize, no brokerage, and no investment-advice constraints.
Proposed research/icp-search-log.md Content
Query Log
| # | Query Strategy | Relevant Sources Found | Finding |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fantasy sports participation and demographics | FSGA industry page | Fantasy sports is a large adjacent behavior; FSGA reports 62.5M U.S./Canada players in 2022, 19% U.S. adult participation, strong draft-party rituals. |
| 2 | Gen Z investing and social media | FINRA/CFA Gen Z report release | U.S. Gen Z investors use social media, search, family, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other channels for investing information. |
| 3 | 2024 investor information sources | FINRA Foundation NFCS investor survey | Young investors rely heavily on word of mouth, mobile apps, and social media channels; social channels correlate inversely with age. |
| 4 | Young investor behavior and digital-first channels | YouGov Gen Z/Millennial investor profile | Younger investors are community-informed, digital-first, and cost-conscious; social media influences their investing more than it does older investors. |
| 5 | Fantasy stock market game competitors | Stocksathon, MarketDraft, MondayPicks | The category exists, with competitors using no-real-money, weekly challenge, portfolio contest, cash-prize, or workplace-group framing. |
| 6 | Stock simulator alternatives | Wall Street Survivor, MarketWatch VSE search result, Investopedia simulator search result | Simulator alternatives emphasize virtual portfolios, learning, trading practice, contests, and portfolio mechanics rather than a draft-first game. |
| 7 | Regulatory/compliance constraints | Investor.gov fantasy stock alert, SEC stock-picking game enforcement release | Pay-to-play fantasy stock competitions and real-return games can implicate securities laws; no-prize/no-entry/no-advice posture is a major constraint. |
| 8 | College stock pitch competitions | Notre Dame Investment Club, USF Investment Club, SMU/Boulevard BIG Pitch Comp coverage | Collegiate investing competitions are active in 2026 and publicly expose team sizes, deadlines, judging, prize pools, and organizer contacts. |
| 9 | Portfolio and paper trading competitions | University of Cincinnati Lindner Investment Challenge, Babson search result | Paper portfolio competition behavior exists, including supervised training, real-market simulation, and multi-week contest windows. |
| 10 | Education simulation alternatives | The Stock Market Game, SIFMA Foundation, Rapunzl | Education demand is validated, but products are curriculum, privacy, classroom, and institutional in orientation. |
| 11 | Finance creator/community tools | StockSpeak, StoryTrading, Discord community search results | Investor communities already coordinate around picks, sentiment, alerts, and influencer/community track records. |
| 12 | Current user sentiment around simulators | Reddit search results for simulator practice, Investopedia delays, student competitions | Forum evidence suggests simulators are known and used, but users debate realism, risk-taking, and whether short competitions teach bad habits. Confidence is lower because Reddit is anecdotal. |
Source Coverage By Category
- Audience and market behavior: FSGA, FINRA/CFA, FINRA NFCS, YouGov.
- Competitors and alternatives: Stocksathon, MarketDraft, MondayPicks, Wall Street Survivor, The Stock Market Game, SIFMA Foundation, Rapunzl.
- College wedge evidence: Notre Dame Investment Club, USF Investment Club, Boulevard Investment Group/SMU coverage, University of Cincinnati challenge, Georgetown/UGA/UCI search results.
- Compliance and risk: Investor.gov fantasy stock trading alert and SEC enforcement release.
- Repo evidence:
README.md,concept.md,desk-flip-report.md, and archived ICP as historical evidence only.
Evidence Matrix
| Claim | Evidence | Inference | Confidence | Assumption Status | Decision Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| College finance clubs are the strongest first ICP. | Notre Dame, USF, SMU/Boulevard, UCI, Georgetown, UGA, and Cincinnati examples show active competitions, deadlines, teams, prize pools, and public organizer paths. | They are easier to identify and reach than broad retail users, and their recurring event needs create observable pilots. | Medium-high | Evidence-backed, but product-format fit remains untested. | Sets primary ICP and artifact emphasis. |
| Broad Gen Z/young investor interest is real but less immediately targetable. | FINRA/CFA reports U.S. Gen Z investing and social channels; NFCS reports young investors' reliance on word of mouth and social channels; YouGov describes young investors as digital-first and community-informed. | There is a large audience for market conversation, but a large audience is not the same as reachable early ICP. | Medium | Evidence-backed for audience behavior; provisional for game demand. | Keeps retail users as secondary expansion, not first ICP. |
| Fantasy sports framing is strong positioning but not enough to pick the primary ICP. | FSGA reports large fantasy participation, young adult skew, football dominance, and draft-party rituals. | The metaphor is legible and social, but stock-interest overlap is not directly measured in the research found. | Medium | Evidence-backed for fantasy behavior; inferred for stock-game fit. | Use as message hypothesis, not segment-selection proof. |
| No-real-money/no-prize/no-advice constraints are essential. | Investor.gov warns fantasy stock trading with entry fees/returns may implicate securities laws; SEC enforcement release references a stock-picking game as an unregistered swap issue. | Draft Stonk should avoid real-money and prize mechanics in early ICP research and prototype language. | High | Evidence-backed. | Blocks creator/public-contest monetization assumptions from ICP artifact. |
| Education is validated but likely a separate product path. | SIFMA Foundation and The Stock Market Game show massive education reach; Rapunzl shows curriculum and privacy positioning. | Educators have real needs and budgets, but school use requires curriculum, privacy, standards, and procurement fit. | Medium-high | Evidence-backed for education demand; inferred for product mismatch. | Defer educator ICP unless user wants an education-first product. |
Research Completeness Gate
The evidence is sufficient for a directional ICP selection, but not sufficient to declare product-market fit or pricing.
Required Question
Is the evidence sufficient to approve this ICP direction for a canonical research artifact?
Confidence And Assumptions
| Conclusion | Confidence | What Would Change It |
|---|---|---|
| College clubs are the best first ICP. | Medium-high | Direct evidence that club officers strongly prefer existing simulators or formal pitch competitions and do not want lighter-weight games. |
| Broad retail remains the largest market. | Medium | Audience surveys or analytics showing that non-club retail users replay and share faster than club users. |
| Fantasy sports players are a positioning segment. | Medium | Evidence of strong overlap between fantasy players and stock-picking interest, or successful acquisition through fantasy channels. |
| Creators should be deferred. | Medium | Low-risk creator/community pilots with clear no-advice framing and no prize/entry-fee dynamics. |
| Educators are a separate path. | Medium-high | User direction to make Draft Stonk an education product, plus willingness to handle privacy/curriculum requirements. |
Alternatives And Lower-Confidence Findings
- Old primary ICP retained as secondary: archived research selected finance-curious retail players. Current evidence still supports that as a broad audience, but the fresh-start wedge should prioritize reachability and fast learning.
- Fantasy sports as primary: rejected for now because the metaphor is strong, but evidence of fantasy-stock overlap is weaker than college-club evidence.
- Creators as primary: rejected for now because public contests and influencer picks raise trust and compliance risk before guardrails are proven.
- Educators as primary: rejected for now because the product would need curriculum, school privacy, procurement, and teacher-support workflows.
- Cash-prize fantasy trading: rejected because it conflicts with the active constraints and SEC/Investor.gov risk signals.
Recommended Path And File Changes
Already written before approval:
prompts/icp/skill-prompt-20260601-114406-icp.md- required visible invocation capture.alignment/icp-draft-stonk.html- this pre-approval alignment page.
Proposed only after approval:
research/icp.md- canonical ICP artifact using the content in this page, with the final required## Next Stepssection appended after approval.research/icp-search-log.md- raw query and evidence log.research/.progress.yaml- only if the approved cross-ICP analysis should park secondary product paths. Current recommendation: do not create it yet because this is a single active product path and secondary ICPs do not require separate active scopes.
Deferred by report-first gate: tasks/roadmap.md and tasks/todo.md. The project workflow asks for task tracking, but the ICP skill specifically blocks canonical research/spec/task writes before approval. If approved, task files can be created or updated as part of the write step.
File Change Gate
Canonical research files will not be created until the user approves this page or provides revision feedback.
Required Question
Which file changes should be made after approval?
Approval Gates
Scope And Non-Goals Gate
The proposed artifact preserves the active constraints: fantasy game only, no real-money trading, no cash prizes, no brokerage behavior, no investment advice, and clear mock/delayed-price copy.
Required Question
Should the final ICP artifact keep those constraints strict?
Final Approval Gate
Answer this when the page is ready for canonical write. If anything needs correction, use section feedback YAML instead.
Required Question
What should the agent do next with this pre-approval research?
Compile Review YAML
Use Compile Feedback YAML if you want revisions or clarification without answering every required gate. Use Compile Answers when every required question has been answered and you are ready for agent review.