After 25 years launching products, I built a tool that tells founders to stop. It's at $1.1k/mo.
ShipFit does something most tools won't: it tells people not to build.
It's small so far, $1.1k/mo, but the number I'm actually proud of is that roughly a quarter of the ideas run through it come out the other side with a "kill" verdict.
Here's why I built a product whose main job is to talk you out of your own bad idea, and help you transform good ideas into money making machines.
I spent 25 years launching commercial products before this. Same lesson, over and over: great products don't come from great code. They come from the discipline before the code. The teams that won weren't the best engineers. They were the ones who decided who they were building for, and what they were really testing, before anyone opened an editor.
Then AI coding tools showed up and quietly broke the one thing that used to protect us from ourselves. Building used to be expensive, and that cost made you at least a little careful about what you started.
Now I can go from idea to deployed in a weekend with Cursor or Claude Code. That should be a superpower. For a lot of us it's a trap — we ship the wrong thing faster than ever. 42% of startups still die from no market need. Building faster doesn't fix that. It just lets you be wrong more efficiently.
I looked at what was out there to help founders decide, and most of it made things worse!!! The "validate your idea" tools mostly told me my idea was great, because that's what keeps you clicking. Confident, encouraging, and wrong. What I actually needed was the opposite of a cheerleader.
So I built it. ShipFit forces nine decisions in sequence before you write a line of code: is it worth building, who actually pays, what actually hurts, how you win, what's really V1, how you charge, whether they'll pay, how you launch, and what you export. You can't skip ahead. Each one is grounded in real data, not a confident guess — real competitor sites, prices with source links, complaints pulled from actual reviews. The part I couldn't fake with a model that just wants to please me. At the end it exports the decisions into config files for your coding tool, so your agent builds the right thing instead of a technically-correct wrong thing.
The honest part, since this is IH: $1.1k/mo is small and early.
What's clearly working is the $5 entry: low enough that skeptical builders will actually try it on a real idea instead of just nodding along. Happy to get into real numbers in the comments.
If you want to run your next idea through it, it's ShipFit.ai and starts at $5. But honestly I'm more interested in the argument than the click: if building is basically free now, what's the one thing you force yourself to decide before you start? Or do you just build and find out?
The observation that AI removed the cost of building, but not the cost of choosing what to build, really stood out.
Moving faster only creates more value if the underlying decision is sound. Otherwise it just shortens the path to the same outcome.
exactly
That's the part I find most interesting.
AI removed much of the execution friction, but it also removed a natural forcing function founders used to have before committing.
The harder question seems to be whether founders will trust a system enough to change direction before they've invested months building.
I'd be curious whether the "kill" verdicts end up being the most valuable outcome users remember.
My take on having done this for 25 years - with successes and failures - is that it's a question of focus and discipline.
That makes sense.
The interesting part is that focus and discipline used to be enforced partly by the cost of building. Now founders need a stronger process to create that constraint themselves.
I'm curious whether you see the biggest failure mode as founders choosing the wrong idea, or choosing the right idea but losing discipline during execution.