Hit 7,900 AI-scored opportunities in the DB (and found 4 competitors to myself)
1 month building solo. Goal: kill the "brainstorming startup ideas" loop
where every thread on r/SaaS is mostly noise.
What I built (in ~30 days of heads-down coding):
A pipeline that scrapes ~5k posts/day from Reddit, Hacker News, and X → AI
extracts repeated complaints + workarounds people already hack together →
clusters into opportunities → scores each on 11 axes (pain, urgency,
willingness to pay, market size, defensibility, timing, etc.) → generates
MVP roadmap + initial risks + competitor landscape.
Everything free to browse, no signup: monetscope.com
The numbers today:
• 7,963 opportunities in the DB
• Bluesky: 2 likes overnight on a 10-post thread (brand new account,
0 followers) 😅
3 things that surprised me:
-
Hacker News > Reddit as a signal source. A 500-comment HN thread often
beats 20 Reddit posts on the same problem. Reddit looks louder; HN is denser. -
"Confidence score" became my most-used filter. Opportunities with high
overall score but low confidence (<0.7) turned out to be landmines — the AI
hallucinated a trend from 2 posts. I now trust confidence more than the
pretty "8.5/10 pain" label. -
We found 4 competitors to MonetScope in our own scan. Including one
called "IdeaScore: AI Side Project Viability Validator." Our scanner
validated us showing up as a validated opportunity. Existential lol.
monetscope.com/discover/ideascore-ai-side-project-viability-validator
What's next:
• "Who should I interview first" feature — evidence is there but not yet
packaged into an actionable validation shortlist
• Weekly digest: which subreddits / HN topics are heating up this week
Stack: Next.js 14 + .NET 8 + PostgreSQL + pgvector + OpenAI (extraction)
- Grok (deep analysis)
Honest state: Revenue is tiny, distribution is the bottleneck. Classic
indie mistake — spent 30 days building, 0 days selling. This post is me
leaning into that.
Feedback genuinely wanted. Especially if MonetScope shows up in your own
scan one day — I'd love to know what's missing.
I know a couple of early-stage founders who might be willing to answer your questions for free; happy to forward them if you'd like.
Benjian, building a pipeline that prioritizes "confidence scores" over noisy sentiment labels is a masterclass in actual market signal processing. By moving past surface-level scraping to multi-axis scoring and competitor mapping, you've turned MonetScope into a high-utility engine that effectively kills the "manual brainstorming" trap for solo founders.
I’m currently running Tokyo Lore, a project that highlights high-utility logic and validation-focused tools like yours. Since you’re building the definitive platform for quantifying market opportunities, entering MonetScope could be the perfect way to turn your own validation journey into a winning case study while your odds are at their absolute peak.