The Dig · the evidence, before the instrument
Before anything is measured, someone has to go and look.
The evidence, gathered and read. Two weeks on one subject, delivered as a single document — and the positions worth putting at risk once it exists.
A position that survives its own measurement is worth more than one that was never at risk.
$7,500 · two weeks · one subject · credited in full against an Assay signed within ninety days
What is gathered
The evidence, read. Not summarised.
01 · The company
What the company actually is, in named and dated facts.
02 · The record
Where its record came from, and who wrote it.
03 · The commerce
The commercial truth, sourced.
04 · The tensions
Held open rather than resolved. A Dig does not tidy a contradiction it cannot honestly close.
05 · The readers
Who they are, and what they are really asking when they ask.
06 · The register
An evidence register in which every claim is attributable, and the estimates are labelled as estimates.
The sun
Then the part that makes it worth having.
A house term, and worth saying plainly rather than assuming it.
Most positioning work ends in a two-by-two. Find the quadrant nobody has taken, plant a flag, defend it. The trouble is that the axes were drawn by a consultant and the quadrant is defined entirely by who else is on the grid. A competitor moves and your position moves with them. You are not standing anywhere in particular. You are standing wherever they are not, which means the ground under you belongs to them.
A sun is the opposite move. You declare the gravitational center of your own world and let everything take its orbit from it. The center is not a claim about the market. It is the thing that is true about the company and would still be true if every competitor disappeared tomorrow.
A quadrant is a position relative to other people. A sun is a position relative to what is true.
So a Dig ends in candidate suns. Not a recommendation, and not one answer: the two or three centers the evidence will actually carry, written down as hypotheses before a single answer is logged, so that when the Assay runs it tests them rather than flatters them.
Declared before the wave, not after. The same rule Touchstone runs on, applied to the thing a company is about to stake.
What it is not
A Dig produces no Retrieval score and no Fidelity score.
No frozen battery, no control set, no run log. It cannot tell you what the machines say about you.
It tells you what there is to say, and what is worth staking.
Commission one
$7,500. Two weeks. One subject.
Credited in full against an Assay signed within ninety days. Dig here first: the language comes after the evidence converges.