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.
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:
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.
| Search | What it catches |
|---|---|
<idea> competitors pricing |
Someone already does this, and what they charge |
<idea> free alternative |
Someone already does this for free |
<idea> regulation <current year> |
A regulator or platform has made it impossible |
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.
Run these even when the searches come back clean.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead or Parked? Use this: could the blocker plausibly change, and would you know if it did?
Pick one, in a sentence, before you explain anything:
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.
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.
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.