u/Username_TBD18

How did Starbucks take over the world by selling coffee? 

Because they didn’t sell coffee. They sold lattes, espressos, macchiatos.  They moved themselves out of the niche they were in and created a new one. 

When I started building SignalCraft I had the vague idea that it would be an idea validator but better.  However, as it’s developed I’ve  realised that it’s moved beyond that. 

I’ve started calling this niche ‘market opportunity intelligence’, although I’m hoping to come up with something catchier. It’s not about validating an idea; it’s about empowering founders by giving them better insight into the market via accurate assessments of customer behaviour (and yes, I know that’s even less catchier). 

Founders innovate. AI doesn’t. In my opinion a start up is more likely to succeed by empowering the first rather than relying on the latter. 

What I’ve learned is that positioning is everything - who is your customer and what are you offering them? - and while you should be working with that at the start of the build you shouldn’t be afraid to modify it. Just as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to build endless new features that no one uses. 

In the short to medium term I’m going to be working on building a leadership position in this new niche alongside the mundane stuff of trying to get traffic to the site. I’ll update you on the progress. 

In my efforts to improve SEO and GEO, and to help establish this new position, I've published another article on Medium, which can be found here: https://medium.com/@d.warnock80/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-may-be-coming-to-an-end-26ce94d5d205?sharedUserId=d.warnock80 - the last article got 6 reads.

In the meantime my metrics are:

Unique visitors: 40

Average time on site: 1 minute, 8 seconds

Revenue: $0

She took our 8 year old ASD ADHD son to watch the musical Six. We have friends who have seen it with their kids and he loves musicals.

Since then he’s been singing lines like “he doesn’t want to bang you, somebody hang you”, and the other day asked rather loudly “what does ‘can’t get it up’ mean?” (Thankfully there was no one around who could hear that time).

It’s like he has a sixth sense for knowing what is the most inappropriate part to say. All the other lines from the songs, doesn’t bother. Just the risqué ones, over and over. We’ve tried telling him not to, but it’s like he can’t help himself.

Anyone else find this?

Most AI idea validators ask: **Do people have this problem?**

SignalCraft goes one step further: **How do people actually behave when they have this problem?**

That distinction matters.

A pain point doesn’t automatically become a business opportunity. People might already have an accepted workaround, be unwilling to pay, or simply not care enough to change their behaviour.

SignalCraft analyses real market discussions and customer behaviour to identify what the available evidence actually supports—not just whether people complain. It doesn’t make assumptions based on AI pattern recognition. It just tells you what it can find.

The goal isn’t to tell you what you want to hear. It’s to help you avoid building the wrong thing.

Signal-craft-validate.com

Most AI idea validators ask: Do people have this problem?

SignalCraft goes one step further: How do people actually behave when they have this problem?

That distinction matters.

A pain point doesn’t automatically become a business opportunity. People might already have an accepted workaround, be unwilling to pay, or simply not care enough to change their behaviour.

SignalCraft analyses real market discussions and customer behaviour to identify what the available evidence actually supports—not just whether people complain. It doesn’t make assumptions based on AI pattern recognition. It just tells you what it can find.

The goal isn’t to tell you what you want to hear. It’s to help you avoid building the wrong thing.

Signal-craft-validate.com

I see a lot of advice on how to organically market a product or service on social media, and the go-to network appears to X based on the number of times it gets mentioned.

I used to be on X, but left shortly after Musk took over because it seemed to turn into a far-right ragehole with an algorithm that was more likely to promote you if you hated everything around you. I’m wondering if that was just my experience though, and what everyone else is seeing.

On current figures, Threads seems to have more regular users now.

Is it still worth pushing things on X? Or is the return on that particular investment shrinking?

So I officially launched my product last night. Now I need to push it.

I’ve never knowingly marketed anything. I work in procurement, so I know a bit about business but I’m used to being the customer and people coming to me. This is something of an experiment for me.

I thought I would document my progress here - hopefully it’ll be of of interest to readers and maybe it’ll help some people in the same boat.

I have no budget, and almost no time due to a day job and family commitments. So I’m going to have to do it all the hard way.

The most important angle is to build credibility in the field. I’m not selling a service, I’m selling an outcome. I’m selling a solution to a problem. There are a lot of low-quality competitors that I need to differentiate, and I pretty much need to create a new gap in the market rather than trying to squeeze into an existing one.

The first step was to publish an article on Medium. This isn’t necessarily for people to read, although it will go towards establishing that credibility. The main point was to start building up a body of references and presence for SEO and GEO. That article is here if anyone wants to read it: Is Your AI Idea Validator Looking for the Wrong Thing? https://medium.com/@d.warnock80/is-your-ai-idea-validator-looking-for-the-wrong-thing-86cb25080bd0

This is day one of my marketing journey. Any tips/advise/ constructive criticism greatly appreciated.

I used to think that 'positioning' was just part of marketing. One of the biggest lessons I've learned building a startup is that positioning isn't marketing—it's product strategy.

I originally built SignalCraft as an AI business idea validator. It worked, but every conversation quickly became "How is this different from ChatGPT?" or "How is this different from all the other validators?" In a previous post, it was obvious that a lot of people don't have a high opinion of these idea validators, viewing them as little more than chatbot wrappers.

So, instead of recreating the product, I changed the positioning.

Instead of trying to tell founders whether their idea is "good" or "bad" with a meaningless score out of 100, it's now positioned as a market intelligence tool. The goal isn't to give answers—it's to gather evidence, identify market signals, highlight uncertainties, and help founders make better decisions themselves. I don't think there's anything truly operating in that part of the market.

The interesting part is that the product feels more differentiated even though most of the underlying technology is the same.

It's a reminder that people don't buy features—they buy the problem they think you're solving.

Has anyone else had a project where changing the positioning made a bigger difference than changing the product itself?

Ok, so that’s bit dramatic, but it’s not far off.

I never learned to code. Gen X, school ‘computer’ lessons were how to type or use MS Paint. Fast internet only happened in my 20s by which time work was getting in the way. It was never just a priority.

A few years ago my wife and I had a son, who has since been diagnosed with autism and very high levels of ADHD along with other issues. Take all the usual issues of being a parent in a full time job and turn them up to 11. I’ll spare you the details, that’s for another subreddit. Basically I’m busy from 6.30am to 9.30 pm 7 days a week without a break

Obviously that takes a toll, and I ended up burnt out, always tired and on anti-depressants. The future promised nothing better than more of the same.

Then i discovered vibe coding and started building apps. My first one was a simple timeline planner to help in my day job. The second one was a habit tracker built for people, like me, whose daily lives were too chaotic to stick to a daily goal.

At this point I got the bug, and I was having ideas faster than I could build them.

And then one day I woke up and realised I wasn’t dreading the day ahead. I was actually feeling positive and excited about working on my side projects. Neither of my apps have generated any money at all, but that’s not the point.

Simply having build something I like to use, even if its vibe coded, has changed my life for the better. It gives me something of my own rather than living my life as an NPC in someone else’s story. And it gives me some hope that the future might be better than my present, even if that is uncertain.

Not looking for feedback here, I just wanted to share my experience. I think too much emphasis is sometimes placed on getting customers and not enough on all the other benefits it can bring.

So my MVP is built. It’s open - and free - for beta testers. Posted about it here, Threads, instagram, and so far… nothing.

People are visiting it in small numbers and having a look around. A couple of people have signed up. No-one’s actually tried to use it. Even for free it seems it’s not worth 5 minutes of their time.

I know this is a process. That Rome wasn’t built in a day, etc etc. but it does feel like I’m just shouting into a black hole and no-ones noticing. It’s a very depressing stage of the business building cycle.

Not wanting anything here - Reddit doesn’t like self promotion after all - but just being transparent for the whole ‘build in public’ ethos here.

If anyone has any tips how to mentally get through this bit, I’d appreciate it.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the “start a side hustle” advice focuses on building the product, getting customers and making sales, but very little on everything that comes afterwards.

Depending on what you’re doing, have you thought about things like:
Data protection and privacy laws
Industry-specific regulations
Professional indemnity or public liability insurance
Terms of use and privacy policies
Intellectual property
Tax and record keeping
Whether your advice or product could create liability if someone relies on it

None of it’s particularly exciting, but sorting these things out early is usually a lot easier than trying to fix them after you’ve launched.

Curious what caught other founders by surprise once they started building?

Pretty much every app seems to be AI driven these days. There’s no denying it’s a useful tool sometimes, but I find it hard to believe it’s so useful it’s the only solution to everything.

I’m curious what people think: what proportion of these AI apps are actually providing good value, and how many are just a fancy wrapper hiding the fact that it could be done by an LLM free account?

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I constantly find myself thinking up new ideas when I'm already halfway through one. Most of them stink, obviously, but some i think are worth exploring. I'm just conscious of juggling multiple projects and not succeeding at any of them.

What would you clever, discerning, people do? Do you build a few different projects and diversify your potential income, or do you just build one and market the sh*t out of it?

I've been seeing adverts everywhere for 'idea validators', and I'm wondering who has used them?

You enter your idea into a form, pay the fee and it tells you how good your idea is. The problem that I see is that the result is just an AI opinion with no detail on how it arrived at that conclusion; and as we know AI can be a sycophantic little sh*t....

In the interest of being proved wrong, does anyone have good experience of using these?