We Wanted to Validate Our Idea. So We Analyzed 90,000 Others

A few months ago, we found ourselves asking the same questions I guess every early-stage builder asks.

• Is this idea original?
• More importantly, do people actually want it?
• What’s the key piece in the value chain we need to capture?

We have been on a journey of building a product that was designed for a niche market of researchers within the public policy sector, to help them analyse surveys more consistently, more thoroughly and significantly faster. Trying to showcase the value add to potential customers we ended up with little traction and willingness to pay for our product.

We landed in that familiar moment every builder dreads. Staring at the gap between effort and traction, wondering whether it’s time to pivot or push forward. As we bounced ideas around, from a slight pivot to doing something completely different, we have spent countless hours searching the internet for validating different ideas.

After being burnt with the “build first, get customers second” approach, this time we didn’t want to rely on our personal experience and gut feel. We wanted evidence.

So we did something a bit extreme.
We analyzed over 90,000 product launches and 60,000 pages of user feedback to figure out what really happens when people put new ideas into the world.

And the patterns were… kind of wild.
Here are some of our main takeaways:

• Most ideas get ignored. Literally zero comments.
• “I’d use this” shows up way more often than “I’d pay for this” (the latter is rare).
• When a product type does get traction, the attention isn’t evenly spread. It clumps, quite a bit. One company usually soaks up all the oxygen while a dozen similar ones get nothing.

We also saw how crowded things really are. Over half of all new launches have at least 6 near-identical ideas already out there. And in the most saturated categories? You might see 20+ similar products — and only one or two that people actually cared about.

This wasn’t just fascinating. It was useful. And we realized it shouldn’t just sit in our Notion.

So we turned it into a tool.
It’s called ShouldIBuild.it.

You write down your idea in plain English. We search the launch dataset, find similar products, and show you what happened when they launched.

You’ll see what kind of attention they got, whether people were willing to use or pay for them, and what kind of signals actually matter.

Most importantly: you get advice on what to do next, before spinning your wheels for 3 months and shipping into the void.

We’ve just made this public (it’s free), and we’d love to hear what you think, what works, what doesn’t, and where it could be more useful.

If you're working on something new - or stuck trying to figure out if you should - maybe this helps you see things a little clearer, a little faster.

Curious to hear your thoughts 👇

Many thanks!