Get a reality check on your startup idea in 5 minutes. One idea, read three ways: the market you are walking into, your own fit against it, and the record of founders who tried something like it before you.
Three reads, each rated favorable, mixed or hostile with the evidence beneath it:
Not how crowded the market is, but what customers already pay for, and what that says about how badly the problem is felt.
Is the ground moving toward this idea or away from it.
Who controls access to this customer, and whether you can actually reach them.
A year of real search data per keyword: monthly volume, cost per click, and which way demand is moving.
Built bottom-up, with every assumption named so you can disagree with any one of them.
The players we found, what each of them does, and where the white space sits.
Real complaints, quoted from public sources, in the words customers used.
What comes back when the idea is put to the tools founders now reach for first.
The closing direction, drawn from what the search, community and competitor layers returned.
No other tool reads the founder. We do, from a public profile, an uploaded CV or LinkedIn export, or your own written account of your career.
We read your whole career against this specific market, then work through five dimensions, each with what we see and what it means. When the read is genuinely thin on two or more dimensions, it says which ones, and what would close the gap on this idea.
How close your background sits to this problem and this customer.
Whether you can ship and run this product, drawing on everything you have done.
Whether you already have a path to the customers you need.
Evidence that you understand the customer's world, not just your own assumptions.
Where you specifically are most likely to struggle.
The same five dimensions applied to each co-founder, then reassessed for the team as a unit.
Hindsight runs two independent passes over your idea and then overlays them. The separation between the passes is the whole point.
Behind the postmortem sits 10,530 documented founder stories, every one tied to a public source. Most of the record is founders who made it work, which is why the read can show you both what killed adjacent ideas and what carried them.
Most stories are about:
The founder read can also be run through the Lenses: knowledge bases we built from what Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital have published about what they look for and which mistakes they warn founders about. Where you line up, where you run into their warnings, and what evidence would change the read. Built from 1,756 videos and 1,414 articles, distilled into 19,275 sourced findings. Every finding is numbered to the video or essay it came from.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, or Sequoia Capital. Lens knowledge bases are built from publicly available content.