What I learned after 25 years as a CPO - The bottleneck moved from code to judgment

You can build anything now.

You can build anything in a weekend now. Cursor, Claude Code, Replit, Lovable. The code is solved. That is exactly the problem. When building was hard, the difficulty filtered out a lot of bad ideas before they cost you anything. That filter is gone.

Most projects that go nowhere are not bad code. They are decisions nobody made before opening the editor. Who pays, what to charge, what V1 actually is, how you launch. Founders skip those and go straight to building, then wonder why they shipped into silence.

The bottleneck moved upstream, from the keyboard to the judgment. ShipFit puts the judgment back in front of the build: nine forced decisions with real data, so you spend your weekend on the idea that deserves it.

42% of startups still fail from no market need, and that number has not moved since AI coding tools arrived.

If you are dev-first vibe coder: Stop building the wrong thing. Make 9 decisions before you open Cursor.

Here is how I handle it now. Before I write a line of code, ShipFit forces nine decisions in sequence: market, buyer, pain, positioning, scope, pricing, demand, launch, and exports. Each one is grounded in real data, real competitor sites, sourced prices, and real reviews, not a confident AI guess. You walk out with a named buyer and their willingness to pay, a defensible price, an MVP scoped to the real hypothesis, a launch plan, and config files ready to paste into Cursor or Claude Code. Or you walk out with a kill verdict and a saved quarter. It starts at $5, with no card to try it.

And it is real data, not AI slop. Every competitor is a real site, every price has a source, every complaint comes from an actual review. A claim you can check beats a paragraph you cannot.

Try it at shipfit.ai. What do you decide before you build?