Introduction

This week I wrapped up the first usable version of the Problem Planner and spent time tightening some of the underlying infrastructure around it.

Most of the effort went into improving the foundations: integrating analytics, adding monitoring, AI evals, improving prompt structure, and aiming to make the system more reliable and interpretable rather than adding new features. As I mentioned previously, the real challenge with AI-assisted products isn’t implementation but designing systems that consistently produce useful outcomes instead of polished AI slop.

Once the first version was live, the next question became: what exactly should this evolve into?

At first, the obvious path seemed to be going deeper into “AI startup validation tooling.” The category displays some traction: Validator AI reports hundreds of thousands of founders using the platform, Dime A Dozen has generated over 100k+ reports, and several tools in the space appear to be building businesses around founder decision support.

Competitive landscape

Researching them, plus others like IdeaProof and WorthBuild, was useful because it clarified both the opportunity and the limitations of the category.

On the positive side, there appears to be demand for founder decision support. Several of the tools I looked at have already reached meaningful scale and user counts (100k+), indicating that people are willing to pay to simplify validation and founder tooling appears to work reasonably well as an SEO/distribution category.

However, most products in the space seem heavily optimized towards generating large AI reports filled with dozens of sections, recommendations, analyses, frameworks, and strategy suggestions. Initially these feel impressive, but much of the value appears superficial, providing broad recommendations, generic frameworks, and inflated outputs that create the feeling of depth without necessarily improving decision quality.

The deeper problem also isn’t necessarily the quality of products but rather the actual workflow itself. “Generate a giant report about my startup idea” is a low-retention pattern. Founders don’t repeatedly validate the same idea forever, and once they settle on an idea, it's unlikely they'll come back soon to validate again.

This seems like it's pushing these offerings toward broadening output in order to drive volume, e.g. expanding tools, longer reports and sprawling SEO pages as opposed to driving clarity or decision quality, which is the real benefit that founders are seeking.

The recurring workflow isn’t validating a single idea repeatedly, but continuously deciding where time, attention, and resources should go next.

What that means for me

This research changed how I’m thinking about my product offering. Instead of working towards another “AI startup validator”, I’m thinking about it as an opportunity intelligence layer to help founders evaluate and prioritize effectively.

The most valuable insight from this process was confirming that my actual pain point isn’t “generate more ideas”, it’s:

• Capturing opportunities properly
• Comparing them objectively
• Understanding tradeoffs
• Identifying weak assumptions
• Prioritizing what deserves attention
• Deciding what not to pursue

Right now, most of my ideas end up scattered across notes, ClickUp, and partially abandoned documents.

The more interesting opportunity may not be validation reports themselves, but building a system that helps ambitious builders to think more objectively and prioritize more effectively in an organized manner.

So for now, I decided to focus on the following.

Refining my roadmap

The near-term roadmap is going to focus on small, focused tooling that incrementally builds toward the following workflow. Initially, the goal is to keep scope deliberately narrow and build lightweight versions of each stage rather than a fully integrated platform:

Stage 1: Opportunity Capture

Intake opportunities from different sources (examples: support tickets, sales calls, market signals, founder ideas, customer feedback, etc).

Stage 2: Structured Evaluation

Assess opportunities across dimensions like urgency, monetization potential, founder fit, distribution realism, validation quality, and strategic alignment.

Stage 3: Validation Workflow

Track interviews, small experiments, prototypes, objections, assumptions, and evidence gathering in order to separate genuine demand from noise and intuition.

Stage 4: Prioritization Engine

Compare and rank opportunities based on evidence strength, confidence, effort, upside, timing, and strategic fit in order to focus limited time and resources more effectively.

Stage 5: Handoff

Once an opportunity survives the funnel, hand it off cleanly into existing execution tools and workflows (Linear, Jira, ClickUp, GitHub, etc) rather than trying to rebuild the entire implementation stack.

The goal is not to own the entire product lifecycle, but to improve decision quality before execution begins. Initially I aim to enable myself to rapidly repeat this process with help from AI and develop this into a product from there.

Importantly, I’m resisting the temptation to expand into execution tooling, project management, or generic “AI founder cockpit” territory. That path quickly leads to a bloated and unfocused product with a shallow set of low quality features. This is why there’s a clear separation where the tool ends, handing off responsibility to established systems.

The product should reflect that: exercising discretion wisely is more valuable than shipping quickly. For builders, it's crucial to choose the right problems, maintain focus, and know what not to build.

Where it’s headed…

Regarding my goals for the upcoming builds, I'm not aiming to build a venture-scale startup around opportunity intelligence tooling. However I do see this project as a good learning vehicle for shipping, AI systems and distribution in the founder space, a personal tool to sharpen my own decision-making and a foundation for future opportunities.

Even if the project never becomes a standalone business, building systems that improve clarity, prioritization, and decision quality feels like a worthwhile investment for where I currently am in my journey. Hopefully some fellow builders find value along the way.