Application Forms

Each cohort has one application form. The platform can generate a tailored form from your programme profile, or you can build one yourself. Either way, you customise it, preview it, and share it with applicants.

How a form is structured

Every form is divided into named sections. The default sections are:

Section	What it’s for
About You	The founder — background, availability, personal context
Your Team	Co-founders and key team members
What You’re Building	The venture — what it is and where it stands
The Problem	The problem being solved and who it affects
Progress So Far	What the founder has learned and what’s real
What You Need	What the founder is working through and what they want from the programme
A Bit More About You	Programme fit questions — how the founder’s values and approach align
Supporting Documents	Attachments, links, and uploads

Sections keep the form navigable for applicants and help your team understand what each part of the form is meant to surface.

The two fixed fields

Every form starts with two fields that cannot be removed:

Full Name — the applicant’s legal name
Email address — used for all communications and to match the applicant across your pipeline

These always appear at the top, before any other questions.

Building a form yourself

Go to the cohort’s Form tab and choose Build manually. You’ll start with the two fixed fields and add questions from there.

For each field you add, set:

Label — the question as the applicant will read it
Field type — see the table below
Required or optional
Help text — optional guidance shown beneath the question
Section — which section of the form this question belongs to

Field types

Type	Use it for
Short text	Names, company names, one-line answers
Long text	Pitches, explanations, detailed descriptions
Number	Revenue figures, team size, funding amounts
Date	Founded date, product launch date
Dropdown	Sector, stage, one choice from a fixed list
Multi-select	Skills, target markets, one or more choices
URL	Website, pitch deck, LinkedIn
Location	City or country of operation

When building manually, you’ll also need to configure your fit criteria and any guard rails yourself — see the sections below.

Generating a form with AI

Go to the cohort’s Form tab and click Generate Form. The platform reads your programme type, ethos, applicant profile, and eligibility rules and produces a complete form in seconds.

The generated form assigns each field a source that tells the review engine what it is for:

Source	What it means
Eligibility	A hard gate check — the answer is evaluated against your eligibility rules
Clarity	Idea intelligence — feeds the idea strength analysis
Programme fit	Reveals founder character against your programme’s selection lens

Fields tagged as Clarity also carry a role — the specific part of the business they’re designed to capture (problem, solution, customer, market, traction, team, business model). The review engine uses these roles to make sure every dimension of the idea strength analysis has enough material to work with.

Editing your form

Go to Form → Edit to modify any form, whether it was generated or built manually. You can:

Edit labels and help text — change wording to match your programme’s voice
Mark fields as required or optional
Add new fields — any field type, in any section
Reorder fields by dragging them within a section
Delete fields you don’t need

Fit criteria

Fit criteria are the dimensions the platform uses to score how well each applicant matches your programme. They sit alongside the form itself and are configured separately.

Each dimension has:

A name — what you’re assessing (e.g. “Founder-Market Fit”)
A weight — its relative importance; all weights must sum to 100
A description — what this dimension means for your programme
A what good looks like rubric — a specific, usable guide for what a strong answer demonstrates

The platform generates fit criteria automatically when it generates your form, based on your programme ethos, applicant profile, and the types of founders you’re looking for. You can adjust weights and descriptions at any time.

Examples of fit criteria

The following are examples of what fit criteria look like in practice for different programme types. Your programme’s criteria will be specific to your ethos and applicant profile.

For an early-stage incubator focused on Nigerian consumer founders:

Customer Rootedness (35%) — Does the founder have genuine proximity to the customer they’re describing? Evidence of direct observation over general claims about the market.
Problem Conviction (25%) — Is the founder compelled by the problem, not just the opportunity? Depth of personal connection or extended exposure to the problem space.
Learning Velocity (25%) — How has the founder’s thinking changed based on what they’ve discovered? Evidence of hypothesis testing and honest revision.
Programme Readiness (15%) — Is the founder at a stage where structured support will accelerate them, rather than doing work they should do themselves first?

For a social impact programme:

Theory of Change (30%) — Can the founder articulate a clear and realistic causal chain from their intervention to measurable community benefit?
Community Rootedness (30%) — Is the founder embedded in the community they’re serving, or working from the outside looking in?
Financial Sustainability (25%) — Is there a credible path to sustaining the work beyond grant funding?
Mission Integrity (15%) — Does the commercial model reinforce or undermine the social mission?

For a technical founder accelerator:

Technical Depth (30%) — How genuine and specific is the technical capability being applied? Evidence of what has actually been built and how decisions were made.
Commercial Translation (30%) — Has the founder moved from capability to customer value? Can they describe who needs this and why?
Distribution Thinking (25%) — Is there a credible plan for getting the product to the right people — not just building it?
Execution Record (15%) — What has the founder shipped, completed, or delivered? Past output is the strongest signal of future output.

Guard rails

Guard rails are eligibility checks attached to specific form fields. When a submitted answer fails a check, a flag appears on the report for your reviewers.

You configure a guard rail on any eligibility field by specifying:

The check type — exact match, number range, date range, list of allowed values, or location
The expected answer or allowed range
The flag label — what your reviewers see if the check fails (e.g. “Outside target location”)

Guard rails are evaluated automatically on every submission. Applicants never see the rule — they only see the question.

See How Applications Are Reviewed for how flags appear on reports.

Reviewing your form

Once your form is built or generated, the platform can run an AI review of its quality. Go to Form → Review to run it.

The review checks for:

Coverage gaps — clarity roles that have no question to surface them, meaning a dimension of the idea strength analysis will have nothing to work with
Fit dimension gaps — fit criteria dimensions with no linked question to reveal them
Eligibility gate gaps — eligibility rules you’ve set on the cohort that have no corresponding guard rail on the form

For each gap found, the reviewer suggests a ready-to-use field you can accept directly into the form without writing it from scratch.

Previewing and testing

Before sharing the form, preview it from the Form → Preview tab to see exactly what applicants will see.

To run a full end-to-end test — including the AI review pipeline — click Test Submission in the preview. This submits a test application that goes through the full scoring pipeline. Test submissions are clearly labelled and excluded from your real analytics.

Once you’re happy with the form and your cohort is Open, copy the public application link from the Form tab. Share it directly with applicants, embed it on your website, or include it in emails.

The link works for anyone — applicants don’t need a Narrative Intelligence account to apply. It only accepts submissions while the cohort is Open.

What happens after submission

The moment a founder clicks Submit, the platform queues their application for automated review. See How Applications Are Reviewed for what happens next.