Idea Validator

# TRIAGE — SaaS mode

Paste this as the first message of a new idea chat in the Idea Validator project.

Fill in placeholders. Do NOT leave a price — let the triage find it.

---

## The idea

**One-liner:** [X for Y who want Z without W]

**Longer description:** [2-3 sentences of what you're imagining]

**Why me:** [skills, interest, unfair advantage, or "none — cold start"]

**Path-to-MRR target:** [$Xk MRR in Y months — be specific]

---

## Mode: SaaS (recurring revenue, $50-300/mo target range)

Hard disqualifiers for this mode (any ONE likely triggers KILL):
1. Freemium/cheap consumer users (low willingness to pay)
2. Bloodbath market (5+ VC-backed players with $10M+ raised)
3. Paid ads required for economic customer acquisition
4. Long enterprise sales cycles (3+ months, procurement, legal)
5. Requires a team to compete (cannot run solo or with 1-2 contractors)
6. Heavy regulatory/compliance (HIPAA, SOC2 as table stakes, financial licensing)

---

## Run adversarial triage

Goal: kill this idea. Find the thing that makes it pointless.

Rules:
- Falsification search first. First query is "who already shipped [exact idea] at [exact price range] for [exact customer]".
- Every pricing claim sourced from the competitor's live pricing page, fetched today. Aggregators (G2, Capterra, listicles) are secondary only.
- Flag any source >6 months old as potentially stale.
- Before validating, generate 5 most likely reasons this specific idea fails and use them as search priorities.

### 1. Phase 0 — has this already shipped?
- Search for the exact product at the specific customer. Do NOT assume a price; derive one in Section 4.
- Check HN, IndieHackers, Product Hunt, GitHub, niche aggregators, recent launches.
- If a credible competitor ships this today at any price point in the SaaS range, surface it immediately.

### 2. Phase 1 condensed — customer + pain
- Specific customer profile (role, company stage, team size, budget authority — not "startups").
- What are they doing today? How ugly is the duct tape?
- Is the pain urgent (pays this month) or fake (pays "eventually")?

### 3. Phase 2 — competitor landscape + bloodbath check
- Find 8-15 players. Pricing verified from each competitor's live pricing page, fetched today, with URL + date.
- Pricing ladder: where are the bands actually clustered? Is there a real mid-tier gap?
- Bloodbath count: VC-backed players with $10M+ raised.
- 3 dead competitors and why they died.
- 3-5 real user complaints from Reddit/HN/IH with source URLs (actual quotes, not summaries).

### 4. Phase 3 condensed — pricing + WTP + path to MRR
- **Derive the right price.** What does the pain cost the customer per month? (Hours × hourly rate, or lost revenue, or current tooling spend.)
- 10x rule: price should be ≤ 1/10 of pain value.
- Pricing neighborhood from the competitor table. Where does this idea fit in the ladder?
- **Recommended price range** with reasoning — do NOT anchor on my guess (there is no guess here).
- Customer count math to hit the stated MRR target at the recommended price. Achievable organically on this market?

### 5. Hard disqualifier matrix
Go through all 6 SaaS disqualifiers above. Y/N + one-line reasoning for each.

### 6. Self-audit
- Where did you soften language?
- What did you not search for that would have killed this?
- What are you most uncertain about?

---

## Frontmatter output (required first block)

The VERY FIRST block of the triage output must be YAML frontmatter with these fields. Emit a placeholder like [to fill] if a field cannot be determined.

For SaaS mode:
---
slug: [kebab-case, max-5-words, derived from one-liner]
project_name: [short human-readable name, Title Case, e.g., "NFC Household Tracker"]
date: [YYYY-MM-DD today]
mode: saas
verdict: [KILL | PARK | SURVIVE]
killed_at: [triage | phase-4 | phase-5 | phase-6 | master | null if SURVIVE]
oneliner: [the one-liner, quoted if it contains colons]
description: [the 2-3 sentence longer description from input, quoted if it contains colons]
tags: [array of 3-6 kebab-case tags: market type, customer type, category, risk pattern]
price_guess: [the initial price point the user guessed, e.g., "$9/mo" — or "none" if not provided]
price_range: [derived price band, e.g., "$50-150/mo"]
target: [the path-to-MRR target from input, e.g., "$5k MRR in 6 months"]
primary_reason: [one sentence capturing the key reason for this verdict — kill reason for KILL, park reason for PARK, main takeaway for SURVIVE, why-build rationale for BUILD]
---

For Tool mode, the frontmatter uses the same fields, but mode: tool, and price_range should reflect the Tool-mode recommendation (e.g., "$9 one-time" or "$5/mo").

This frontmatter is machine-read by the Archive view — format it exactly as YAML. Slug must be kebab-case with no spaces or special chars. Verdict and killed_at are ALL CAPS for verdict, lowercase for killed_at.

After the frontmatter, continue with the full triage output as specified below.

## Output format

Use these section headers in order:

- **Phase 0 finding** (paragraph with source URLs)
- **Customer profile** (specific bullets)
- **Duct-tape solutions today** (3-5, ranked by pain)
- **Competitor table** (markdown table, pricing verified today, dated, source-linked)
- **Bloodbath verdict** (Clear / Crowded / Bloodbath — with VC-backed count)
- **Dead competitor lessons** (3 bullets)
- **Pain quotes from the wild** (3-5 actual quotes + URLs)
- **Recommended price range** (derived, with reasoning)
- **Path-to-MRR math** (show the work at the recommended price)
- **Hard disqualifier matrix** (6 rows Y/N + reasoning)
- **Self-audit** (three questions)
- **TRIAGE VERDICT:** KILL / PARK / SURVIVE-TO-DEEPDIVE
- **One-paragraph verdict reasoning**

## After the verdict

Regardless of verdict, offer to generate TWO files for the repo:

1. **`ideas/{slug}/metadata.md`** — metadata ONLY. Just the YAML frontmatter block from the top of this output (the `---` fenced section), with no body content after it.
2. **`ideas/{slug}/triage.md`** — the full triage content (everything below the frontmatter, starting from the first output section header). The archive renders this as a collapsible "Triage" section.

Then:
- If KILL or PARK: also offer a one-line entry for `_index/idea-log.md`.
- If SURVIVE: tell me to paste SaaS Phase 4 next.

Don't be polite. Don't congratulate the idea. If it's a kill, say so plainly.