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Reality Check / in 10 minutes / only $29

Is the market there, and
are you the founder to serve it?

Three reads, delivered the same day, before you build anything. A structured Market Scan reads whether the demand is real. A Founder-Market Fit read shows how you line up with the idea. And Hindsight Intelligence shows you what happened to the founders who went before you.

Read one
Is the market there?
A same-day desk analysis of demand, timing, and distribution - each component rated plainly, with the evidence behind it.
Read two
Are you the founder to serve it?
A per-dimension read on how your background, domain knowledge, and customer access line up with the idea.
Read three
What happened to founders before you?
A premortem projects how your idea most plausibly fails. Where our record holds a genuine match, a postmortem shows what actually killed founders in the same territory.
Run a Reality Check →
Question one · Market Scan

Is the market actually there?

A same-day desk analysis, AI-run, that reads market viability the right way. Each component is rated plainly - favorable, mixed, or hostile - with the evidence behind it.

Read 01
Competitive landscape, read correctly
Not "how crowded is it," but what customers already pay for - and what that says about how badly the problem is felt.
FavorableMixedHostile
Read 02
Timing and trend direction
Is the ground moving toward this idea or away from it? Search demand, category momentum, and what changed recently.
FavorableMixedHostile
Read 03
Distribution reality
Who controls access to this customer, and can you actually reach them - or does someone else own the gate?
FavorableMixedHostile

Illustrative ratings. Your scan rates each read on your idea's actual evidence.

The Market Scan is context, not a verdict. It tells you whether the conditions are favorable before you spend a week testing your solution against real strangers.

Question two · Founder-Market Fit

Are you the founder to serve it?

A per-dimension read on how your background, domain knowledge, and customer access line up with the idea. Five dimensions, each an observation and a practical implication. Hover to see what each one asks.

Domain proximityHow close your background is to this problem and this customer. Execution capabilityWhether your experience suggests you can ship and run this product. Channel & audience accessWhether you already have a path to your customers, or need to build one. Founder-customer empathyEvidence you understand how they think and what they actually need. Realistic execution riskWhere you are most likely to struggle, and how to plan around it.

If your fit looks thin on a dimension, the read tells you exactly where and what would close it - it never invents a different idea for you. A strong background does not rescue a hostile market, and a thin one does not disqualify a real opportunity. You get both reads, clearly separated.

The frameworks behind the read

The same logic investors already use.

Founder-market fit is not our invention. It is how founding teams get evaluated before there is any product. We apply it for you, not against you.

2011
Chris Dixon
Named founder-market fit as a leading indicator of reaching product-market fit: who is building matters nearly as much as what the market says.
4
NfX signals
NfX operationalized it into four observable signals: domain obsession, founder story, personality, and relevant experience.
~30%
Bill Payne Scorecard
The standard pre-revenue valuation tool weights the founding team at roughly 30% of total valuation - more than any other single factor.
Read three · Hindsight Intelligence

What happened to the founders who went before you.

Anyone can ask a chatbot "will my idea work?" and get a confident guess. Your Reality Check checks the record instead. We've curated 8,703 real founder stories - sourced, not synthetic, each tied to a public account of what actually happened - and analyzed them across the most common startup verticals: SaaS / productivity, e-commerce / D2C, marketplaces, AI tools, developer tools, media, consumer apps, edtech, and fintech. When your idea has genuine precedent in that record, you see what happened to the founders who tried before you. The corpus grows every day.

We then run a premortem analysis, which assumes your idea is two years old and it failed. Work backwards - what killed it? Reasoning from failure backwards surfaces the risks optimism hides: the distribution gap you assumed away, the customer acquisition cost you never modeled, the dependency you called "solvable." It is a hard exercise to run on your own idea, so you don't run it alone. Our trained AI agents run the premortem for you, grounded in research on how startups actually fail, and bring back your sharpest projected failure modes.

Two lenses, one blind spot

What could kill your idea.
What actually killed others'.

The premortem projects what could kill your idea. The postmortem comes from something real: our growing database of founder stories, collected from the many places founders write about their journey - what they built, how it went, and why it succeeded or failed. When your idea is close to ideas in that record, we show you what actually happened to the founders who tried. Where projection and record agree, pay attention.

Always included
The Premortem
Our trained AI agents assume your idea failed two years from now and work backwards. What killed it? Your sharpest projected failure modes, surfaced before you build.
Only on a genuine match
The Postmortem
What actually happened to founders who tried something like your idea, and why. Shown only when our record holds founders whose ideas were genuinely close to yours. If it doesn't, we tell you plainly and show you the premortem alone - we never dress up loosely related stories as precedent.
Confirmed Risk Area
Where both lenses point to the same risk: your highest-confidence blind spot, corroborated from two directions. Confirmed by forward analysis and backward evidence - not theory.
The next step

Reality Check does not tell you whether your idea works, Market Validation does.

We deploy AI agents to run a real market validation on your behalf. Real outreach to real strangers who match your customer profile. Real community posts in the places they live online. A landing page built specifically for your idea. Real-time monitoring of every response. And when it matters most, real human conversations that you take yourself: we arrange the calls, you talk directly to your customers.

Start Market Validation →