Skip to content
Zero Employee Startup
Menu

Zero-Employee Score · model ZES-0.1

How zero-employee is your company?

Nine inputs, a published model, and an honest answer. The score shows what limits it, how confident it is, and what to change first.
Recurring workflow automation
20%
Human-headcount dependence
15%
Founder intervention
15%
Agent decision autonomy
15%
Contractor dependence
10%
Revenue per human
10%
AI & software economics
5%
Approval burden
5%
Operational resilience
5%

Leave anything you don't know blank. Unknown is excluded, never scored as zero.

Team
people

How many founders actively operate the company?

People with ownership who work in the business. Passive investors are excluded.

Unknown
people

How many employees are there, excluding founders?

People on payroll (full- or part-time), counted per person, not FTE. Contractors go below.

Unknown
FTE

How much recurring contractor time do you use, in full-time equivalents?

Recurring freelancers and agencies doing ongoing execution, as FTE (40 h/week = 1.0). Exclude one-off professional services like an annual audit.

Unknown
Operations
% of recurring workflows

What share of recurring workflows run end-to-end without a human executing steps?

List workflows that recur at least monthly (billing, onboarding, support triage, reporting, deploys…). Count those executed by software or agents, with humans only approving or handling exceptions.

%
Unknown
hours / week (all founders)

How many founder hours per week go to recurring operational execution?

Hours spent doing recurring work by hand: answering tickets, running reports, manual deploys, invoicing. Exclude strategy, product decisions, sales conversations and approvals.

h
Unknown
approvals / week

How many times per week must a human approve an automated action before it proceeds?

Approval interruptions (refunds, outbound emails, deploys, payouts). Approval of high-risk actions is healthy; the score measures load, not existence.

Unknown
Autonomy
level 0–4

What is the highest autonomy level your AI agents operate at in production?

Count only agents running in recurring production workflows, not experiments.

Unknown
level 0–3

What happens if every founder is unreachable for two weeks?

Assume no emergencies beyond normal variance. Judge customer-facing quality, not just uptime.

Unknown
Economics
USD / year

What is your annual revenue or current annualised run rate?

Trailing-twelve-month revenue, or current MRR × 12. In USD.

$
Unknown
% of revenue

What do AI, software and infrastructure cost as a share of revenue?

Monthly model/API spend, SaaS subscriptions and hosting, divided by monthly revenue. Excludes payment processing fees.

%
Unknown
Score —0% observable ↓

What it is

A model, not a law

The score is a weighted combination of published response curves. The same inputs always give the same result, and no language model is involved. The weights reflect our judgement; we publish them so you can disagree precisely.

Unknowns

Unknown is not zero

Leave inputs blank when you don't know them. They are excluded and widen the possible range instead of dragging the score down. A point score appears once 60% of the model is known.

Next

From score to blueprint

The score tells you where you stand. The Zero-Employee Architect maps each workflow to the right executor and sequences the changes as reversible experiments.