Kill a bad idea in an hour

A free skill from the Solo Founder Skills pack — the complete file, not an excerpt. Download the .md

The point of this first hour isn't to decide whether to build. It's to find the reason not to, fast. Ideas that survive an hour of this have earned the next step.

An hour here often saves three months of building. Worth doing even when the person is already sure.

How to go about it

You're not trying to shoot the idea down. You're trying to find out cheaply whether the hard part of this business is something they can actually do. Say what you find plainly, including when the idea survives.

Two things to watch in yourself:

• Don't soften it. Turning "a regulator banned this" into "something to keep an eye on" wastes the whole exercise. If it's dead, say it's dead.
• Don't rescue it. Suggesting "you could do it as a managed service with inspectors on the ground" usually swaps in a different, harder business. If you want to suggest a pivot, call it a new idea and run it through the checks again.

Step 1 — three searches

First, work out where. The regulation search is useless without a jurisdiction, and most people describe an idea without naming one — "my city", "here", "back home". Ask before searching. Guessing wastes a search and can send you to the wrong country's rules entirely.

If they genuinely operate in more than one market, run the regulation search for each. The answer often differs.

Then run all three. They catch different things.

The third one is the one people skip, and it kills ideas the other two never would. A rule change can make a working business unbuildable overnight, and it leaves no competitors behind to warn you — they all quit.

If there's a good free alternative, the idea is usually dead. "Mine will be better" isn't a finding, it's a hope. Ask what would actually make someone switch from free, and whether that thing can be copied.

Step 2 — four checks

Run these even when the searches come back clean.

Who owns the pipe, and would they build this themselves?

If the product depends on a platform — a messaging app, an app store, a payment processor, a bank regulator, someone's API — then that platform can change the economics whenever it likes, and often ships the same feature free. A solo founder sitting downstream of a big platform is renting their business model.

Count them — they stack. One idea can sit under three owners at once: a physical gatekeeper (an airport, a venue, a landlord), a platform that already does the matching, and a payment rail with its own licensing. Each can kill it on its own. When you find one owner, keep looking for the others.

Ideas with nobody in between the founder and the customer are worth more than they look. Weight this heavily — closer to disqualifying than to a deduction.

If the same kill reason keeps coming up across someone's ideas, that pattern is the finding. Screen on it first, before any searching, and save the hour.

Is the hard part the code?

Ask what has to go right for a customer to be happy. If the answer involves trusted people in physical places — inspectors, carers, drivers, warehouse staff — this is an operations business with software bolted on. The software is the easy 10%.

That doesn't mean it can't work. It means it's a different business than they think they're starting, with different skills, different money and none of the margins.

What's actually the bottleneck?

For most people weighing up ideas, the bottleneck is talking to customers, not coming up with ideas. Someone with five promising ideas and no customer conversations doesn't need a sixth. If that's the pattern, say so.

What have they already got live?

Something already built and shipped but never marketed will usually beat starting a new zero. Marketing a thing that exists is a shorter path to money than building a thing that doesn't. If that applies, say it straight rather than judging the new idea on its own.

Step 3 — the verdict

Dead or Parked? Use this: could the blocker plausibly change, and would you know if it did?

• A rule, a licence, a gatekeeper's policy → Dead. These rarely move and waiting isn't a plan.
• Missing money, missing data, missing a partner, bad timing → Parked, with the unblocking condition written down.
• The full-scale version already existed and died → Dead, and it's the strongest kill there is. Always search for it: the market tested this at full funding and the answer came back.

Pick one, in a sentence, before you explain anything:

• Dead — and what killed it
• Parked — alive but stuck on something specific, and what would unstick it
• Live — survived everything, plus the one assumption worth testing next

For anything not dead, name the cheapest next test — something that could still kill it, doable this week, without building.

For something you called dead, offer a disproof instead: the cheapest thing that would prove you wrong, and what you expect to happen. "Hand-match five of these for free this week — I expect you won't fill five" costs nothing, respects that you might be wrong, and usually settles it in days. It's not a rescue plan: no building, no pivot.

Write the verdict down

Ideas come back. The same one, or its cousin, turns up in a few months with the enthusiasm reset. Write down the decision and the reason — "killed by the central bank's single-principal rule in April" is reusable. "Didn't seem great" isn't.

Keep one file for this, somewhere you'll find it again. If they already keep project notes, append there. If not, make idea-log.md in the working folder and say that's where it lives — "write it down" with no location quietly becomes nothing.

## <idea, one line>            <date>
Verdict: Dead | Parked | Live
Killed by / blocked on: <the specific thing>
Searches that mattered: <which, and what came back>

Check new ideas against the list before searching. If the same kill reason keeps showing up, that pattern is worth more than killing the tenth version of it — say so plainly instead of running the hour again.

Example

Idea: an app that reconciles card-machine payouts for small shops.

• competitors pricing → a few, all enterprise-priced. Looks like a gap.
• free alternative → the machine vendors give basic statements free. Weakens it.
• regulation <year> → the central bank now requires each merchant to work through a single principal. The data the product needs isn't available to a third party any more.

Dead, on the third search. Note that the first two made it look fine. Competitor research alone would have green-lit three months of work.