How a verdict is made.
IdeaTribunal runs your idea through the formalized v19.5 framework: gather real evidence, check the ten ways ideas die, apply nine hard gates, then return a brutal verdict with sources. The goal is to kill a dead idea in minutes - before you spend 60 days and $5-10K building it.
The pipeline
One engine, run as ordered stages. Demand is measured against Google Keyword Planner. Competitors, OSS, pricing and regulatory evidence come from live open-web search - every claim ships with a source URL. The ten killer-pattern detectors and a final brutal-honesty judge run on the LLM. No source is named that the engine does not actually query.
Parse → demand evidence → 10 killer detectors → web evidence (competitors / OSS / pricing / regulators) → hard-gate resolver → score → verdict → brutal-honesty judge.
Ten killer patterns
Most ideas die from one of ten recurring patterns. Each is checked independently with cited evidence and a falsifier. Open the full catalog →
- K1Validator-killer (developer API trap)
- K2B2C consumer trap (sub-$10 ARPU ceiling)
- K3Regulator made it free (public-infra moat)
- K4Platform built it natively
- K5OSS already closed the market
- K6Free incumbents saturated it
- K7Paid competitors entrenched
- K8ChatGPT replaces it
- K9No painful status quo
- K10Tarpit idea-class (graveyard of funded attempts)
Nine hard gates
Gates are deterministic pass/fail checks over the collected evidence. A failed gate caps the verdict regardless of how high the score is - the score never overrides a gate.
- G1Credible demand signal (search-proxy threshold)
- G2Demand evidence present (search / community)
- G3Payment & pricing demand
- G4No OSS / official incumbent owns the core job
- G5No foundation-model / platform replacement risk
- G6Data-access feasibility
- G7Monetization fit
- G8No regulatory red-flag
- G9External evidence backs G1-G8
A falsifier on every claim
Every piece of evidence carries a falsifier - the specific thing that, if found, would refute it - graded STRONG / WEAK / REJECT. Trivial falsifiers (“if the data shows otherwise”) are rejected outright; weak ones lower the report’s confidence. It keeps the verdict refutable, not vibes.
Scoring
Total = Magnitude (54 pt - how big the opportunity is) + Pure (46 pt - how clean it is of killers) = 100. The score does notpick the verdict: the hard-gate resolver sets the maximum verdict first, then the score ranks the idea’s strength inside that allowed bucket.
The verdict
- NO-GOAlready dead. A hard gate failed - building it wastes 60 days.
- WATCHLISTNot now. Real blockers; revisit if the market shifts.
- TESTWorth a cheap experiment before you write code.
- GODemand + monetization + no killers. Rare.
- REFORMULATEToo vague to judge - the engine refuses to score air.