I spent 4 months building an AI that tells founders when NOT to build their startup.
I work full-time, so this has been evenings and weekends for months.
During that time I kept seeing the same pattern:
Founders spend weeks validating ideas, but most feedback is either:
friends saying "sounds cool"
Reddit comments
random opinions
So I built an AI-based founder evaluation engine.
Instead of generating a business plan, it tries to answer one question:
Would an experienced founder actually spend time building this?
It scores the idea across several dimensions and gives a recommendation to continue, refine or stop.
I'm still very early.
I'm not looking for investors.
I'm looking for honest feedback from founders.
If you were validating your next startup idea, what would make a tool like this genuinely useful?
The “stop” recommendation is probably where this gets most interesting.
“Continue” is easy to accept. But if a founder is genuinely considering dropping an idea because the system said stop, the evidence behind that judgment suddenly matters a lot more than the score itself.
Exactly. I think “continue” is relatively easy to justify — but telling someone to stop is where the evaluation really needs to earn trust. That’s something I’m trying to get right. What kind of evidence would you personally want to see before trusting a “stop” recommendation?
Good question. I have a fairly specific view on what would make a “stop” judgment credible, but it depends on what the evaluation is actually claiming.
Probably better discussed outside the thread. If you're open to email, what's the best address to reach you on?
Absolutely. You can reach me at: bakken5c@gmail.com
I'm genuinely interested in your view on this.
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Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
I've been thinking more about Aryan's question here.
I think the hardest part of building something like this isn't telling a founder to continue — it's having enough evidence to justify telling someone to stop.
A “stop” recommendation should probably be uncomfortable, but defensible. If a founder is going to walk away from months of work because of an evaluation, the reasoning behind that recommendation matters just as much as the recommendation itself.
That's one of the things I'm trying to get right with Zyqerion.