The Shelf / Strategy / Demand Validation Engine
Demand Validation Engine
BUILD, SLICE-OK, PIVOT, or KILL — decided from public evidence, before you burn a build.
The job: decide whether an idea deserves a build — BUILD, SLICE-OK, PIVOT, or KILL — from public evidence, in one session, before any code exists.
Most idea validation fails in one of two directions. Either the agent cheerleads ("strong signal! users would love this!") and you build something nobody wanted, or it applies a venture-capital bar (moat, incumbent-killer, huge TAM) and kills everything, including ideas that would have quietly paid rent. This skill is the calibrated middle: a repeatable gate, tuned by real validations that went both ways.
How it runs
Phase 0 checks whether willingness-to-pay is already revealed — incumbents visibly earning money proves the market in minutes and skips the rest. If not, it mines the public corpus: competitor revenue data, named subreddits, HN, trade forums, review sites — briefed to disconfirm your thesis, not confirm it, and required to return verbatim quotes with citations, the strongest counter-signal included.
Then the verdict. Competitor existence is not a kill condition; there are exactly four things that are, and the framework names them. Crowded category, free alternatives, clone-ability, small TAM — none qualifies alone. And after demand passes, one more gate most validations skip: the discovery path. Name the channel that will carry users, with evidence it already does. The skill includes the real worked example that made this gate mandatory — an idea that passed demand cleanly and died when the category's own influencer-backed entrant, promoting to millions of followers, turned out to have a few hundred ratings to show for it.
What's inside
SKILL.md— all phases, the verdict framework, the four kill conditions, the discovery-path gate, the honesty rulesreferences/demand-dossier-template.md— the full dossier format with a rubric for filling it honestlyQUICKSTART.md— install for Claude Code, claude.ai, and Codex, with a first-run prompt
Who it's for
Solo builders and small teams choosing what to build next, and anyone wiring a go/no-go gate into an agent pipeline. If you've ever shipped to zero users, this is the file that would have said so first.
Why not a free directory download
A free "validate my idea" prompt has never killed anything it should have, or saved anything it shouldn't. This framework's rules each trace to a real validation — including its own past mistakes, corrected in the file (ideas wrongly killed on "it's crowded"; forum sentiment wrongly trusted over revenue). Field-tested, documented, issued as-is.
FIELD REPORT real output, not a promise
Setup: two real validation runs from our own pipeline (products anonymized), showing the skill's two decisive moves — the Phase 0 shortcut and the discovery-path-gate reversal.
Run 1 — revealed WTP short-circuits the mine (verdict: BUILD)
Idea: a photo-library cleanup app (swipe to keep/delete, reclaim storage).
Phase 0 check: willingness-to-pay was already revealed before any forum was opened. Public app-intelligence revenue estimates at the time of the run: the leading swipe-cleaner incumbent around $1M/month, the category leader around $5M/month, and the top-10 cleaner apps' combined annual revenue estimated near $200M.
The call: demand and WTP are PROVEN — money at that scale settles it; no corpus mine needed. The residual risk named honestly: funnel conversion and store-review differentiation in a crowded category, which are build/GTM problems, not demand problems. Verdict: BUILD, with the wedge and discovery path defined next. The app was built and shipped.
What the skill prevented here: a week of forum mining that would have surfaced hundreds of "just do it manually / there are free ones" comments — the anti-buyer's voice, already outranked by revealed revenue.
Run 2 — demand passed, discovery gate killed it (verdict: KILL)
Idea: a bucket-list travel app (keep and share a life list; no booking).
Phase 3 read: PIVOT — demand looked real. People demonstrably pay for pure list-keeping apps in this space at prices from $4.99 up to $239.99/yr, with no booking function. Thesis adjusted, wedge identified.
Phase 3.5 discovery-path gate: killed it anyway. The category's own influencer-backed entrant — founded by a family-travel brand with millions of YouTube/Instagram followers, promoting their own app to their own audience — had topped out at 679 App Store ratings at the time of the check. A massive built-in audience converting that thin is strong evidence the niche itself is small, not that a new entrant merely needs a better channel. No named channel could show proof it carries demand at viable scale.
The call: KILL, explicitly superseding the Phase 3 PIVOT. Recorded verbatim in the dossier: gate result FAIL, verdict flipped, reasoning attached.
What the skill prevented here: the more dangerous failure — an idea that passes the demand check, feels validated, and ships into a niche where even the best-distributed player can't find an audience.
SERVICE RECORD living gear — updated as the factory learns
v1.0.0 — 2026-07-17
First issue. Ported from the factory's internal skill: sanitized for general use, methodology intact, field report captured from a real run.
Every update ships free to owners — your locker always serves the latest version.
QUESTIONS
Does this replace talking to customers?›
It replaces waiting on interviews to make a call. The verdict is decided from public evidence — competitor revenue, real user voice, channel proof. An interview kit is included but strictly opt-in.
Won't the agent just tell me my idea is great?›
The skill forbids it. The research brief is written to disconfirm, the dossier requires the strongest counter-signal with a citation, and the rules ban hedge-verdicts like 'the signal is encouraging.'
What's the discovery-path gate?›
A second gate after demand passes: name the one channel that will carry users, with proof it already does for products like this. It exists because a good product in an unfindable niche makes the same zero dollars — the worked example in the skill is real.
Is this iOS-specific?›
No. The examples lean consumer-app because that's where it was field-tested, but the phases, verdict framework, and gates apply to any product idea — SaaS, B2B tools, content businesses.