Startup Idea Validator

What the startup idea validator does

Describe your idea, who it is for and what people use today, and tell us how far you have come. The validator uses an AI language model to give you a structured first read of the idea in about 15 seconds: a short summary, a rating for five areas, the single assumption everything depends on, the main risks, and three or four cheap tests you can run next.

It rates each area on the evidence you have given, not on how exciting the idea sounds:

• Clear: specific and plausible from what you wrote.
• Needs evidence: plausible, but vague or untested.
• Risky: a likely weak point or a serious open question.

That is deliberate. Nobody can predict from a paragraph whether a startup will succeed, and a tool that gives you a score out of 100 is pretending otherwise. What a structured read can do is show you where your thinking is still a guess, so you know what to test first. The validator does not invent market sizes or statistics, and it is not financial or investment advice.

The tool is free and needs no account. Each visitor gets 5 runs per hour and 20 per day. Your text is sent to our server only to write the assessment and is not published anywhere.

The five areas it checks

These are the questions an experienced founder or early investor asks in the first ten minutes of hearing an idea.

1. Problem. Is there a real, specific pain, and do people already spend time or money trying to solve it? “People would love this” is not a problem. “Shop owners lose two hours a day on the phone confirming repairs” is.
2. Customer. Can you name the first group of buyers precisely enough to find twenty of them this week? “Small businesses” is a category, not a customer.
3. Solution. Does your product solve that problem better than the alternative in a way customers would notice, and can you build a first version with the resources you have?
4. Competition and alternatives. What do people do today? The biggest competitor is often a spreadsheet, a phone call or doing nothing, and “we have no competitors” usually means nobody wants to pay for it yet.
5. Business model. Who pays, how much, how often, and does that leave enough after the cost of serving them and winning them?

How to get a useful assessment

The output is only as specific as your input. A one-line idea gets generic questions back. A few honest sentences get a sharper read. A good description covers:

• What you sell, in plain words, and the price if you have one in mind.
• Who buys it and who uses it, if those are different people.
• The problem, in the customer’s words if you have heard them say it.
• What they use or do today instead.
• What you already know: conversations, sign-ups, a pilot, first sales.

Be honest about the stage. If you pick “just an idea”, the validator will treat your claims about customers as assumptions to test, which is exactly what you want at that point.

Worked example: a booking app for bike repair shops

A founder plans to create a booking and text-update app aimed at independent bike repair shops in the Netherlands. Through it, customers reserve a repair slot online and receive a text once their bike is ready, while shops are charged a monthly fee. She lists "paper booking books and phone calls" as the current alternative and selects "I've talked to potential customers". Below is the result a test run of the validator produced.

The problem, the customer and the solution were all rated needs evidence. The reason is instructive: she had spoken to shop owners, but her description did not say what they told her, so the validator asked exactly that. How much time do the phone calls cost? How many owners did you talk to, and how do they handle bookings today? Competition and the business model were rated risky: paper books and phone calls are free and familiar, and she had not tested a price.

The biggest assumption it named: that shop owners will pay a recurring fee to replace a free paper system for a problem they may tolerate as minor. The suggested tests were practical. Run a concierge pilot with three to five shops, using a shared calendar and manually sent texts, before building anything. Ask the pilot shops to commit to a monthly fee, even a small deposit, before the product is finished. A good signal is shops that keep using it for weeks without being reminded, and that agree to pay before it is fully built.

Notice what would move the ratings. If she adds “four of the five owners I interviewed said phone calls about ready bikes take an hour a day”, the problem stops being a guess. The validator is most useful when you run it again after each round of evidence.

Cheap ways to test an idea

Most ideas can be tested in days, without writing code. The validator will pick the ones that fit your idea, but here are the usual options:

Decide before each test what result would change your mind. “If fewer than 3 of 10 shop owners agree to a paid pilot, I rethink the pricing” is a test. “Let’s see what people think” is not. Our guide on how to validate your idea goes deeper into interviews and early experiments.

From validated idea to business plan

Once the riskiest assumption survives a real test, put numbers on the idea. Start with the TAM SAM SOM calculator to size the market you can realistically reach, then the startup cost calculator for the money you need to launch. The break-even calculator shows how many customers cover your costs, and the burn rate and runway calculator shows how long the money lasts. Still looking for a name? Try the startup name generator. Every free tool is on the tools page.

When you are ready to write it all down, Cuttles walks you through the pitch, business plan and budget in one guided app. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial.