The itch
I keep lists of ideas. Always have. Notebooks, Notes.app, a dozen half-finished Google Docs. Most of them are junk I'd be embarrassed to read six months later — clever premises with no demand signal, AI reskins of tools nobody asked for, "wouldn't it be cool if" with zero "who would actually pay."
The useful ones — the ideas that survived a hard second look — were the exception. I wanted a system that produced more of those, on purpose, and threw the junk out before it earned a folder.
Why public
Three reasons, in order of importance:
- Public is a discipline tax. A private idea can be vague. A public idea has to hold up — which means I actually do the research, cite the signals, and pick a verdict. If I can't, the idea gets killed instead of rotting in a notebook.
- Most ideas aren't zero-sum. I can only build one thing at a time. If twenty decent ideas sit unbuilt for a year, that's a worse outcome than someone else shipping one of them. Steal anything that sparks.
- Feedback beats pondering. A proposal with a score and a verdict invites disagreement. People tell me where the math is wrong, where the wedge is weaker than I think, where a competitor already ate the market. That's worth more than a hundred solo brainstorms.
What I'm actually hunting for
Something I can build with a small team — one to five people — in under six months, that could realistically hit $1M–$5M ARR in eighteen to twenty-four months. No unicorns. No ten-million-dollar capex. No crypto revivals. No regulated markets unless the regulation itself is the moat.
What does catch my eye: boring markets where incumbents have terrible UX, workflows where AI collapses a two-hour task into two minutes, tools that professionals will pay for this week, localized plays where global SaaS hasn't bothered, and micro-SaaS niches too small for venture capital but perfect for a bootstrapper with taste.
What I get out of it
Sharpened thinking, mostly. Every idea I write forces me to articulate who the customer is, what they pay today, why now, and how I'd get the first hundred — in a voice that doesn't let me hedge. Some days the answer is "this is the one, I'm building it." Most days the answer is "nope, move on." Both outcomes are useful.
If an idea turns out to be the one I build, the catalog becomes the archive of why. If someone else builds it first, I either congratulate them or learn something from what they got wrong.
What you get out of it
A growing catalog of pressure-tested ideas you can read, disagree with, copy, or ignore. Everything's free. No gated content, no paywall, no "subscribe for the juicy ones." The PASSes stay too — they're often more useful than the GOs, because they show you what the market already figured out.
If you ship something from here, I'd love to know. If you think the rubric is miscalibrated or the math is wrong, I'd love that more. Email's on GitHub.
The honest disclaimers
- I have biases. The operator persona skews toward SMB B2B SaaS, because that's what I know best. Consumer and deep-tech ideas are under-represented.
- I'm sometimes wrong. A 78 today might be a 55 in six months. The timestamp on every proposal is there for a reason.
- I publish slowly on purpose. One idea per run, every few days. Quality of reasoning over volume of slop.
- Nothing here is investment advice. The verdicts tell you whether an idea is worth building, not whether it's worth funding.