A developer got fed up with Claude spitting out billion-dollar-app nonsense for every startup idea he threw at it. You know the type of response: “This idea has massive potential across multiple verticals.” Cool. Does anyone actually want it? Will they pay? Can you reach them without burning your savings on ads? Claude out of the box doesn’t ask those questions. It validates. It encourages. It hypes. So this developer stopped asking Claude to be his cheerleader and started making it behave like a skeptical investor who’s seen 10,000 pitches and has zero patience for wishful thinking.
The result is four chained AI workflows that think like a VC partner, not a hype machine. Open source, runs end-to-end in 10-15 minutes, and it’s live on GitHub right now. The prompts are structured, the chain is deliberate, and the output is the kind of honest feedback most founders only get after wasting six months building the wrong thing.
The twist
Most startup idea tools generate ideas. This one kills them. The whole pipeline ends with a hard verdict: build it, test it, or drop it, with reasoning attached. That verdict is the point. Getting a score is easy. Getting told “drop this one” is rare.
That rarity is the problem with most AI-assisted ideation. The model wants to be helpful, so it finds angles. It surfaces the best-case scenario. It buries the structural problems under optimistic framing. This pipeline is designed to do the opposite. The scoring workflow doesn’t just identify weaknesses, it weights them. A killer distribution problem will tank a verdict even if demand and monetization look strong. A weak retention story will show up in the numbers before you’ve written a single line of code. Getting a “drop it” with a clear reason attached is genuinely useful information. It tells you where to spend the next 15 minutes, not the next 15 months.
How it works
Four workflows run in sequence, structured the way a VC would actually evaluate an opportunity:
- 🔍 Trend analysis, scans TikTok, Reddit, App Store, YC, and niche analytics reports to check if there’s actually a market shift behind the idea. Not just “is this popular” but “is this growing, and did it just start growing, or has it already peaked.” Timing is everything in consumer apps and this step surfaces it.
- 📊 Idea scoring, grades your concept on demand, monetization, distribution, retention, and competition. Numbers, not vibes. Each dimension gets scored independently so you can see exactly where the idea is weak instead of getting a blended average that hides the real problem. A 7/10 overall can hide a 3/10 on distribution, which is usually fatal.
- 🧪 Riskiest assumption test, identifies the one assumption that will kill the business if it’s wrong, and how to test it cheaply before you build anything. This is the step most founders skip entirely. They build first and discover the broken assumption during launch. This workflow forces the question early: what has to be true for this to work, and how can you find out in a week instead of a year.
- 📈 Market sizing and gap analysis, competitor mapping including indirect competition, with pivot suggestions based on the weak points the scoring surfaced. The indirect competition piece matters more than people think. Your real competitor isn’t always another app. Sometimes it’s a spreadsheet, a habit, or just doing nothing. This workflow names those alternatives and shows you where the gaps actually are.
Pro tip
Don’t just run new ideas through this. Run your current idea through it. The scoring workflow will expose the weak points you’ve been quietly ignoring, and the pivot suggestions often surface something sharper than what you started with.
Specifically, pay attention to the distribution score. Founders consistently overestimate how easy it will be to reach their target user. If the workflow surfaces a distribution problem, take it seriously. Ask it to generate three alternative distribution channels you haven’t considered. The gap analysis workflow has enough context at that point to give you genuinely useful pivots, not generic “try content marketing” advice. Run the riskiest assumption test on each pivot before you commit to any of them. That’s 45 minutes of structured thinking that replaces three weeks of spinning your wheels.
Who should use this
If you’re stuck in endless idea mode with no filter, this is the filter. If you’re already building something and wondering why traction isn’t clicking, the riskiest assumption test alone is worth the 15 minutes. And if you’re a solo founder without a co-founder to stress-test your thinking, this pipeline does a reasonable job of being the skeptic in the room. It won’t replace a real conversation with someone who’s built before, but it will stop you from walking into that conversation with obvious blind spots.
The real value isn’t any single workflow. It’s the chain. Each step feeds the next with context, so by the time you hit the final verdict, it’s built on actual analysis rather than a cold prompt. That’s the structural difference between this and just asking Claude “is my idea good.” The answer to that question is almost always “yes, here’s why.” The answer at the end of this pipeline is occasionally “no, here’s exactly why, and here’s what you should do instead.”
Open source at github.com/MaxKmet/idea-validation-agents. Full thread in r/PromptEngineering if you want to see how the chaining is structured. 🚀
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can the market sizing catch fake-large opportunities, or do those still slip through?
The scoring model looks beyond just market size, it evaluates demand, monetization, distribution, retention, and competition together. That said, no model replaces real customer validation. The riskiest assumption test helps identify which factors need field research before you invest time building.
Q: Why is trend analysis such a critical first step?
Most people jump straight to validation without checking if there’s an actual market shift happening. This framework analyzes trends across TikTok, Reddit, App Store, and YC to find real demand signals first. It avoids wasting time on ideas that sound good but have no market tailwind.
Q: How long does the full workflow actually take to run?
The entire process, trend analysis through market sizing, competitor research, and pivot suggestions, runs end-to-end in about 10, 15 minutes. It’s built as chained agentic skills, so you get a clear verdict (build, test, or drop) fast instead of spending weeks on analysis.
Fixed Claude to give startup ideas that don’t suck (no “make a billion dollar app bs”)
by u/Medical_Ad_8282 in PromptEngineering