Founders Don’t Need More Goals. We Need Our Goals Turned Into Tasks.
Right now, one of the top ideas on the Indie Hackers Idea Board is: AI business planner that converts goals into actions.
When I saw it on the leaderboard, I smiled, because this is exactly what we’ve been building at Nean Project.
The pattern is simple: founders don’t struggle to set goals. We struggle to turn “Launch in 3 months” or “Hit $1k MRR this year” into concrete steps we can execute this week. Then real life hits, client work, context switching, endless “research” and the big goals stay big and vague.
With Nean Project, I’m trying to remove that gap. You tell the platform your goal and it turns that into an ordered set of tasks you can actually do. Not a 10-page strategy doc. Just the full, structured visual tree of tasks.
Seeing the same idea show up as a top-voted Indie Hackers concept is strong validation. It tells me other founders feel this pain too, not “planning is hard” in general, but “please, someone just turn my goal into a plan I can follow.”
We haven’t nailed it yet. I’m still learning what level of detail helps, and where AI should decide vs. where the founder should stay in control.
If this resonates, I’d love feedback from other Indie Hackers: what would your ideal “AI planner that turns goals into actionable steps” look like for you as a founder?
This resonates. I think there are two different problems hiding under "founders are overwhelmed" though, one is turning a goal into a plan (what you're building), and the other is figuring out what today's plan should even react to when three different parts of the business are pulling at once. I'm the founder of FounderFlow, we focus on the second one, surfacing the 2-3 things that actually need a decision today, so I've been thinking about this line a lot. Do you see Nean staying focused on the planning side, or eventually wanting to react to what's actually happening day to day too?
This resonates a lot, turning goals into weekly executable actions is the real bottleneck. One thing I’ve noticed is founders already describe these exact struggles in Reddit threads (“how do I go from idea to launch?”), and those discussions rank on Google for years. Tools like Nean feel perfectly positioned to plug into that moment of intent. Curious: are you already using Reddit threads as a feedback + discovery channel while refining the task depth?