Know if your idea will survive reality before you build it.
Validation shouldn't be a chatbot score. Idea Validation runs your idea through 12 evidence lenses and returns a GO / KILL / PIVOT verdict a named human stands behind — before you spend months building the wrong thing.
- Optimised to agree
- No kill criteria
- No one accountable
- 12 lenses with kill criteria
- Evidence graded A–E
- Named analyst signs verdict
Not sure where your idea is weakest? Try the 3-minute free probe first →
In one line
Idea Validation is an idea-validation framework that runs your startup idea through 12 evidence lenses with hard kill criteria, grades every claim A–E, stress-tests it against realistic shocks, and returns a single GO / CONDITIONAL GO / PIVOT / KILL / DEFER verdict a named human stands behind — not a flattering score. Free Pulse; £149 Pro.
Who uses Idea Validation
Built for founders who want an honest verdict
Idea Validation is stage-aware. The rubric adjusts from idea-only (where all evidence is inferred) through to post-revenue companies considering a significant pivot. You are never penalised for being early.
Pre-Seed Founders
You have an idea, a problem you believe in, and limited runway to test it. Idea Validation tells you whether it's worth building — before you spend a single day building it wrong.
- Idea or early MVP stage
- Preparing your first investor narrative
- Choosing between competing ideas
- Deciding whether to leave employment
Series A Founders & PMs
You are extending a product line, entering a new vertical, or considering a strategic pivot. The stakes are board-level. Idea Validation gives you a structured framework to defend the decision with evidence, not instinct.
- New product feature or vertical
- Pivot after a traction plateau
- Board-level product decision
- Pre-fundraise narrative validation
Corporate Innovation Teams
Running Idea Validation across your product pipeline at £149 per idea is the fastest way to separate high-probability investments from resource-consuming projects that should never have proceeded.
- Internal product launch decisions
- Innovation pipeline triage
- Pre-build investment justification
- Stage-gate decision support
How it works
From idea to verdict in four steps
No intake interviews. No waiting weeks. Submit your idea, choose your tier, receive your verdict.
Submit your brief
Describe your idea using the structured prompt guide. Include target customer, mechanism, and why now. No call needed.
12 lenses evaluated
Each lens runs its structured rubric — problem fit, market size, moat, unit economics, team, and seven more. Every claim is evidence-graded A–E.
Stress scenarios run
15+ realistic shocks — macro, regulatory, competitive, and capital. Each one named and scored, not hand-waved.
Verdict + action plan
One of five verdicts. GO includes an Amplification Plan. KILL or PIVOT includes a Salvage Matrix and Rescue Plan. DEFER names the exact re-evaluate trigger.
What a verdict looks like
Five verdicts. Zero flattery
Idea Validation doesn't produce optimistic summaries. Every report resolves to one of five clearly-defined verdicts — scored, graded, and signed by a named analyst. See our public verdict data → — read why most ideas earn KILL → — or browse 22 real KILL examples →. New to this? Start with the complete market validation guide, or see how Idea Validation compares as a ValidatorAI alternative.
Vertical SaaS · SMB accounting automation
Strongest lens: Problem fit (4.8/5) — 3 paying workaround customers identified. Gate passed: CAC payback <6 months at median ARR. Proceed to build.
B2B marketplace · construction procurement
Gate: Moat lens (3.0/5) triggers a conditional. Validate a supply-side exclusivity mechanism before Series A. Three experiments named in Amplification Plan.
D2C supplement brand · performance nootropics
Kill criterion: Regulatory lens triggered — UK MHRA classification requires clinical substantiation. LTV collapses below CAC at compliant acquisition cost. Pivot & Rescue plan included.
Healthcare · GP direct appointment booking
Core idea fails: GP referral pathway cannibalisation creates regulatory and NHS contract conflict. Adjacent opportunity: Private specialist booking at 3× price point. Three pivot experiments named in Rescue Plan.
Autonomous fleet management · urban last-mile
Timing gate: Unit economics are viable, but DSIT AV regulatory framework (expected Q1 2026) is the critical unlock. Re-evaluate trigger defined. Three productive pre-regulatory actions specified.
Start Free. Go deeper when the stakes do
Run the Pulse at no cost. When you need the full 12-lens analysis — evidence graded, verdict structured, human-accountable — go Pro.
Proof-First Promise
- GO / DEFER / KILL signal + reason
- One critical next step
- Delivered via email in 15 min
£149 = 12 lenses graded A–E · Synthetic Intelligence Population™ (2,500 modeled customers) · 15 adversarial + 5 investor personas · 60 scenarios · structured voting & consensus · 30-min call · GO/KILL/PIVOT verdict with reason
- Full 12-lens analysis, graded A–E
- Synthetic Intelligence Population™ — a modeled population of 2,500 target customers, segmented and evidence-tagged
- 15 representative adversarial personas + 5 investor personas, drawn from that population
- GO / CGO / PIVOT / KILL / DEFER verdict
- 60 evidence-based market and business scenarios simulated against them
- Structured voting, consensus analysis, minority opinions & confidence scoring
- 30-minute debrief call included
- Amplification/Rescue Plan + Priority Experiment List
- Signed by a named human analyst
- ≥3 material risks found, or full refund
Submit → secure payment link in 5 min → report in 24h
One-time payment · No subscription · No auto-renewal
Prices shown in GBP, all-in — switch to ₹ for India pricing (incl. 18% GST).Prices shown in INR, incl. 18% GST — switch to £ for international pricing. The 24-hour clock starts only when you pay — and pauses if we need a clarification, so you never lose that time. One-time payment — no subscription. Full refund within 30 days.
Corporate or volume? Contact Us →The methodology
12 lenses. One verdict
Idea Validation doesn't produce a confidence score. It runs 12 structured analytical lenses — each scored 0–5, evidence-graded A–E, carrying a kill-criterion check. Any single kill criterion overrides the composite score.
Evidence grading scale — applied to every claim in your report
Actual customer data, signed contracts, audited financials, or published regulatory documents.
Peer-reviewed research, credible market reports (Gartner, McKinsey, ONS), or industry body data.
Logical extrapolation from B-grade evidence with named assumptions stated explicitly.
Reasonable but unverified. Flagged as a belief requiring confirmation before proceeding.
Unverifiable at this stage. Automatically added to your priority experiment list as a named test.
A report heavy in D and E grades is not a failure — it is an honest map of what you need to test next. That is more valuable than a D-grade report that reads like an A.
Is the problem real and urgent? Do customers pay for workarounds today? Evidence of pain without a solution is the most powerful signal we look for.
Is the market large enough, growing, and accessible at this stage?
Is the ideal customer defined precisely enough to acquire at cost?
Does the solution create a defensible value prop vs. existing alternatives?
What is the durable competitive advantage? Which of Helmer's 7 powers applies?
Does the model reach viable unit economics at realistic scale? CAC:LTV, payback period, and gross margin stress-tested against three scenarios.
Is there a credible first-customer acquisition path without paid scale?
Can this be built and delivered at the cost and quality the model requires?
Regulatory pathway mapped with timeline, cost, and clearance type.
What shocks kill this? Pre-mortem written, with a stress battery across macro, regulatory, and competitive shocks.
Does the team have the capability to execute the critical path?
Is the timing right? What needs to be true for this to work now vs. in 3 years? The synthesis lens — integrates all signals into a final timing assessment.
After the verdict
Every outcome has a next step
A verdict without a plan is just a score. Pro delivers an actionable roadmap regardless of the outcome — because a well-structured KILL with a rescue path is more valuable than an unexamined GO.
Amplification Plan
When your idea passes, you get a structured plan for turning the validation into momentum — not just a thumbs up.
- →Next competitive power to acquire (Helmer's 7 Powers ladder)
- →Lens-by-lens ceiling-break actions, ranked by delta-per-cost
- →Adjacent expansion sequence + what not to do this year
- →Pricing escalator and named flywheel with its bottleneck identified
Pivot & Rescue Plan
When your idea fails, you get a structured recovery — because the assets you've built have value even when the idea doesn't.
- →Salvage Matrix — 8 assets scored: preserved / partial / written off
- →3 adjacent problems your team could attack in 30 days
- →Pivot type from Ries' ten, with riskiest assumption identified
- →Revisit trigger: specific condition that would change the verdict
Timing Assessment
Your idea is structurally viable, but a named external condition must change before the economics work. DEFER is not a failure — it's a precise statement of when to act.
- →Named trigger condition — exact event that changes the verdict
- →Earliest realistic re-evaluation date with rationale
- →3 productive actions to take while the market catches up
- →Leading indicators to monitor: the signals that mean it's time
What £149 gets you
Inside a Pro report
Structured PDF, delivered within 24 hours. Board and investor ready. See every section →
Composite score, verdict, and single critical reason — synthesized from structured voting and consensus analysis across the full persona panel, not one model's opinion. Three next actions. 90-second board scan format.
Each lens scored 0–5, graded A–E, with kill-criterion check and the specific claim driving each score.
15 representative adversarial personas, drawn from a modeled Synthetic Intelligence Population™ of 2,500 target customers, built to object, not to please — each stress-tests your value proposition with real objections and blockers. Adversarial stress test grounded in a modeled population, not literal individuals or market research — methodology.
5 investor/business-analyst personas, drawn from that same modeled population, structured around real due-diligence categories: team & execution, market sizing, financials & unit economics, product scalability, and risk.
60 evidence-based scenarios simulated across market, competitive, technology, and economic shocks — synthesized into base, optimistic, pessimistic, and wildcard reads, each with score impact and the one assumption that flips the verdict.
Five failure stories from 24 months out with named root causes, plus a red team challenge round that attacks the idea's strongest-scoring claims directly.
GO: Amplification Plan with ceiling-break actions. KILL/PIVOT: Salvage Matrix + Rescue Plan with three adjacent pivots.
Every D/E-grade claim becomes a named experiment with hypothesis and success metric. Your validation roadmap, ready to run.
Illustrative — fictional company
This is what lands in your inbox
Not a score and a shrug — a signed verdict with the evidence behind it. Here's one page of a real report format, built with a fictional company.
Three named competitors already own this segment; one raised £4.2m Seed in 2023. The "no competition" premise is false, and the margin claim that justifies entry is unverifiable. Signed: Pranav Unni, Lead Verifier.
Honest comparison: including doing nothing
Gut feel, AI chatbots, dedicated validation tools like DimeADozen, and expensive consultants are all real options. Every one of them gives you information or a score. Idea Validation gives you a verdict a named human stands behind. The most honest column in this table isn't any tool — it's doing nothing, and finding out the verdict 12 months and a runway later.
| Criterion | Idea Validation · ThriveFinity | AI Chat Tools | AI Score Toolse.g. DimeADozen | Consultants | Doing Nothing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structured verdict One of five verdicts: GO / CGO / PIVOT / KILL / DEFER | ✓ | ✗Opinion, not verdict | ✗Score, not verdict | ~Varies by scope | ✗ |
| Evidence graded A–E Every claim scored from verified evidence to pure inference | ✓ | ✗Hallucination risk | ✗Cites sources, no grading | ~Varies | ✗ |
| Stress scenarios Macro, competitive, regulatory, and capital shocks — named and scored | ✓60 scenarios | ✗ | ✗None at any tier | ~At extra cost | ✗ |
| Amplification or Rescue Plan GO gets an Amplification Plan; KILL/PIVOT gets a Salvage Matrix | ✓Every outcome covered | ✗ | ✗Data, no action plan | ~Varies | ✗ |
| Turnaround time From brief submission to verdict | 15 min – 24h | Instant | Instant – 24h | 6 – 12 weeks | Months of wasted runway |
| Entry price Lowest cost to get a useful output | Free | Free – £20/mo | Free / $9 / $129 | £15K – £150K+ | Founding team salary × months |
| 30-day refund guarantee Full refund if the report doesn't hold up | ✓ | ✗ | ~14-day, limited terms | ✗ | ✗ |
| Human-accountable verdict A named verifier signs the report — not just an AI output | ✓ | ✗AI only | ✗Fully automated | ~At high cost | ✗ |
| Built to EU AI Act Art. 50 obligations AI assistance disclosed, sources licensed, EU-hosted data | ✓ | ✗No disclosure | ✗No disclosure | ~ | ✗ |
Competitor data reviewed June 2026. Pricing and features may have changed — verify at each provider's website before deciding.
The £149 question
A free chatbot answer is only cheap if it's right
ChatGPT and sub-£20 validators cost almost nothing — and confirm almost anything. The real price isn't the tool; it's the months you spend building on a flaw it flattered. Here's the math founders actually face.
Optimised to be agreeable. No kill criteria, no evidence grade, no one accountable for the answer.
A typical 6-month pre-seed build in founder time and cash — spent before the market tells you the premise was flawed.
12 lenses with hard kill criteria, evidence-graded A–E, signed by a named analyst. One caught flaw pays for itself thousands of times over.
The ROI: £149 is under 0.4% of a £40k build. If Idea Validation catches a single fatal flaw before you commit, the return is roughly 270× — and you still walk away with the idea you should build next. Doing nothing, or trusting a chatbot that wants to please you, is the expensive option.
Start your Idea Validation
Run your first validation
Select your tier and tell us about your idea. We'll take it from there.
The KILL verdict saved us six months. We were about to hire a dev team. The rescue plan gave us three better ideas to test instead.
— Founder, B2B logistics startup · Pro
A 5-question diagnostic. Verdict in 15 min. Returns a GO / DEFER / KILL verdict with one critical reason and one next step — free, always.
Full 12-lens analysis with evidence grading, 60 evidence-based scenarios simulated against 15 adversarial + 5 investor personas, 30-min debrief call, and a structured verdict. Delivered in 24 hours.
Idea validated? Now verify your claims
Idea Validation tells you whether to build. Pre-Launch Verification tells you whether your claims will survive investor and customer scrutiny. Need to verify a specific pitch deck claim right now? QUAD is designed to run in sequence.
Explore Pre-Launch Verification →Founders who stopped guessing
We'd already closed a small round on this deck, so I thought it was fine. The PLV report came back and it wasn't harsh or vague — it was just specific. Three claims I thought were solid had either no primary source or were citing data from 2018. One of them was the headline number on the deck cover. We fixed everything, went back, and closed £100,000 from an investor who'd previously passed. I still think about how close we came to walking into that meeting with a deck we couldn't defend.
Read full case study — Daily99We brought ThriveFinity in before we'd published a single piece of content. I wanted search to be a proper acquisition channel from day one — not something we figured out two years in. They designed the whole strategy, built the cluster structure, even created a content track around ERC-8004 that nobody else was covering. Sixteen months later we're ranking top 5 for self-hosted crypto gateway terms and getting traffic from 130 countries. Starting right matters more than I expected.
Read full case study — PayRamHonestly, I thought our GTM was fine. We were getting enquiries, we had a clear service, the market felt right. The Strategic Intelligence report showed us we were speaking to the right people but framing it completely wrong — we were positioning on quality and price when our target clients were actually buying on outcomes and risk reduction. We rebuilt the whole pitch around what the report found. The conversion went up. But more than the number, I finally felt like I understood why some deals were closing and others weren't.
Read full case study — TVP Studios