I turned my IT governance checklist into a live tool. Not sure anyone wants that yet.
A while back I wrote up a checklist for non-technical founders, the boring stuff, password managers, 2FA, backups, who owns the vendor list nobody remembers signing up for. 20+ years of IT governance work, compressed into something you could actually finish in an afternoon.
It sold okay as a PDF. But a PDF you check once and forget isn't actually the job. The job is remembering to come back to it when something changes first user, first paying customer, first hire.
So I built a small version of it as a live scorecard instead. Same 38 items, same reasoning behind each one, but it tracks what you've actually checked and highlights what matters most at your current stage instead of dumping all 38 on you at once.
I'm intentionally not calling this a "GRC platform." That word belongs to tools built for companies chasing SOC 2 audits with a compliance team behind them. This is for the stage before that one person, no budget, just trying not to get blindsided by something a checklist would've caught.
Honestly not sure if this is a real want or just a nice-to-have wrapped around content I'd already written. Before I build it out further (saved notes, a vendor tracker, whatever), I'd rather find out.
Here it is: https://grcarc.netlify.app/
It's deliberately unstyled beyond the basics. I care more right now about whether this is useful than whether it's pretty.
If you're a solo founder or a two-person team: would you actually use something like this, or is a static checklist genuinely enough? What would make you come back to it a second time?
I think the problem is not about having the list or not. I mean don't get me wrong, keeping all things in a single box, do make life easier. But I think the real issue lies in the practice, how to make sure to repeat all of these steps for each account and even when this list is not handy. At times, a user just want to get done with the signup and move on. I wonder if it strikes to that mindset somehow.
That's a sharper problem than mine, honestly. My idea assumes someone opens the list and works through it methodically. Yours points at something else: signup is a moment where nobody wants a chore, they want to be done. Maybe the real fix isn't a checklist at all, but catching the 2 or 3 riskiest habits (password reuse, no 2FA) at the exact moment of signup itself, rather than hoping someone comes back to a list later. Is that closer to what you mean, or something else entirely?
It sounds like you already have real pain and a working solution for yourself. I would love to know what kind of feedback or signals would make you feel confident that this should be pushed further, rather than just kept as a personal tool.
Who do you imagine as the ideal user right now- solo IT leads, small teams, consultants, or something more specific? How do you do the marketing part?
Fair question, and I'll answer it straight instead of dodging it.
Signal that would make me push this further: someone coming back to check something a second time without me prompting them, or someone asking "can I pay for the version that does X" before I've mentioned pricing at all. Neither has happened yet, so right now this is still a personal tool I'm testing in public, not a validated product.
Ideal user, honestly, I don't know yet. My instinct says solo IT leads or ops-minded solo founders (people who already know these risks exist but don't have time to build proper process around them), rather than non-technical founders who don't know what they don't know. But that's a guess, not evidence.
Marketing right now is just this, posting where the target person already hangs out and asking direct questions instead of pitching. No ad spend, no funnel, nothing built yet. If it earns real signal, figuring out where these people actually are is the next problem to solve, not before.
That's great! I'm also building a tool for indie hackers and solo developers, and I'm looking for honest feedback from early users.
Which marketing channels would you recommend?
Looks pretty good to me
Appreciate it! Curious if you tried checking anything off, or picked a milestone from the dropdown. Genuinely want to know if it holds up past the first look.
The "come back to it a second time" question is really a churn question in disguise for a checklist-style product — I've been thinking about the same thing building CancelKit (churn-prevention widget for Stripe SaaS): the honest signal isn't asking people if they'd use it, it's watching the moment they're about to abandon or skip a step. That's usually more revealing than any hypothetical yes. Have you instrumented how many first-time visitors even check off item #1 vs. bouncing on the unstyled page? That's probably where "not sure if this is wanted" hardens into "not wanted", before the live-tracking part ever gets to prove its value.
That's a fair reframe, and no, I haven't instrumented anything yet, so right now I don't even know if people get past item #1. Good callout. Before I add tracking though, I'm actually more curious about the trigger idea a few others raised here: would you want something that only speaks up when an actual event happens in your business (first hire, first payment), rather than a page you have to remember to reopen?
This is the same problem I kept running into building FounderFlow (I'm the founder, mentioning since it's relevant to your question). A static checklist works exactly once, the first time you actually read it carefully. After that it turns into something you feel vaguely guilty about not reopening. What would bring me back isn't more detail, it's the tool telling me specifically what changed since last time, "you just hired your first person, here are the 3 items that now apply", instead of making me rescan all 38 to find the ones that matter now. That's the difference between a tool and a PDF with buttons on it.
That's exactly the gap: "here are the 3 items that now apply" instead of making someone rescan all 38. Straight question back: if this existed as a real feature (you tell it "I just hired someone" and it surfaces just those 3), would you actually use it, or is that still more than a solo founder needs?
Honestly, yes, I'd use it, and it's basically the feature I keep wanting to add to FounderFlow too. I'd rather be told "you just hired someone, here's what changed" than have to remember to check a list myself. Event-triggered is closer to how founders actually operate, we react to what just happened, we don't audit on a schedule unless something forces us to.
I've bought a checklist PDF before and then never opened it again after the first read, so I recognize the problem you're describing exactly. The honest answer to your question, for me, is that a static checklist is enough right up until the moment something changes — new hire, new vendor, first real customer — and then it's worthless because I have no reason to go back and re-check it against my current state.
What would make me come back a second time isn't more items, it's a trigger. Something that pings me when a change in my business should trigger a re-check, rather than relying on me to remember to open the tool. Right now the tool is passive — I have to bring the moment to it. If it could sit quietly and surface itself at the moments that actually matter (right after I add a new tool to my stack, say), that's the difference between a scorecard I check once and one I treat like a smoke detector.
Also curious: are you tracking which of the 38 items people actually check off first? That ordering alone might tell you which 5-6 items are the real product and which are padding.
The smoke detector line is a good way to put it, and you're right that it's fully passive right now. No tracking on which items get checked first yet either, that's a real gap. Before building that though: if it pinged you the week you hired your first person or added a new tool, saying "here's what just became your problem," would you actually want that nudge, or would it just be noise you'd mute?
you basically diagnosed your own product in the post: 'a pdf you check once and forget isn't the job, the job is remembering to come back when something changes.' that sentence is the whole thing. the checklist isn't the value, the reminder at the trigger moment is.
so the honest answer to your want-vs-nice-to-have question: as a passive scorecard you refresh manually, it's a nice-to-have and it'll churn. the version people pay for reaches out. 'you just made your first hire, here are the 3 items that now apply to you.' 'you took your first payment, here's the one thing that changes.' nobody pays to re-open a checklist, but they'll pay for the thing that pings them before they get blindsided.
so i'd test the trigger, not the list. ask a few early-stage founders 'would you want a nudge the week you hire your first person telling you what security stuff just became your problem?' if that lands, build the event-driven nudges next, not more static items. the 38 items are your content moat, the timing is the product.
That's a sharper version of what I was circling in the post, honestly. Taking your suggestion literally: if I asked you directly, "want a nudge the week you hire your first person telling you what security stuff just became your problem," is your honest answer yes, or is that a "nice in theory, I'd ignore it" kind of yes?
honest answer: yes, and i can tell you exactly why it survives the "i'd ignore it" filter. it's event-triggered. a weekly security digest i would archive unread forever. a one-time nudge that fires the week my situation actually changed reads like a config reminder, not content. the trigger is the product. the checklist itself is a commodity i could google.
the test i'd apply: if the nudge arrives and i can act on it in under 10 minutes (a concrete "do these 2 things now"), i act. if it opens a 40-item audit, i defer it forever. so the hire-your-first-person nudge should ship with the two-item version, not the whole checklist.
This comment was deleted 2 months ago
"Not sure anyone wants that" is usually a distribution signal, not a product signal — governance/checklist pain often lives in IT ops / compliance threads before people search for a tool.
Are you planning community hunting (Reddit etc.) for validation, or waiting for inbound?
I run a small discovery tool that scores fresh threads where people describe the pain. If you're actively looking for strangers who'd pay, I can walk through a sample mapping on a quick call.
Truly appreciate the offer. I think I want to keep testing this the low tech way for now (posts like this one) before adding another tool into the mix. If the trigger based version turns out to be real, I may come back to this. Will keep this in mind.
Totally fair — low-tech validation first is the right call. Don't add a tool until the trigger is real.
I'll leave the door open: if later you're drowning in manual hunting across posts/threads, ping me and we can revisit. Good luck with the checklist → live tool path.
Appreciate that, genuinely. Will keep it in mind if the manual hunting gets old.
This comment was deleted 2 months ago
I like that you're turning governance from a one-time document into an ongoing process.
A checklist answers "have I done this?" once. A live scorecard answers "what changed since the last time I looked?" That's a much better fit for early-stage companies, where the risks evolve every time the business reaches a new milestone.
That's the exact distinction I was hoping would land. Right now it's more "checklist with buttons" than truly live, but that's the direction a few people in this thread are pointing me toward. Would the "what changed since last time" version be something you'd actually check regularly, or mostly a nice idea?
That's a good question.
I do have a view on it, but I don't think the answer exists independently of the product you're building. I'd rather explain the reasoning in the context of your direction than reduce it to a generic opinion.
If you're open to it, what's the best email to reach you on?
I think you already have it, actually, you emailed me a few days back on another post. Same address still works. Happy to pick this up there rather than duplicate the thread here.
To answer briefly in public too though, since others here might be wondering the same thing: right now my honest lean is that "what changed" only matters if it's tied to something real happening in the business (a hire, a new tool, a first payment), not a calendar reminder. A calendar-based nudge just becomes another notification people learn to ignore. Curious if that lines up with what you were thinking, or if you had a different angle.