r/StartupMind

I’m working on a product for founders who want to make better decisions before spending time, money, or traffic on the wrong thing.

The problem I’m trying to solve:

A lot of startup decisions are expensive to validate.

Changing pricing can hurt conversion.
Changing copy can confuse users.
Changing onboarding can reduce activation.
Launching a feature can waste weeks.
Running interviews or A/B tests takes time and often requires traffic you may not have yet.

So I’m building Polyhyle: a simulation platform where you can model a product/business scenario and see how different synthetic user segments might react.

Examples:

• simulate a pricing change
• test positioning and landing page copy
• predict objections before launching
• compare feature concepts
• simulate user reactions to a competitor move
• estimate impact on conversion, churn, adoption, or trust

To be clear: I don’t think simulated users replace real customers.

But I do think they can help founders narrow down bad ideas faster, generate better hypotheses, and decide what is actually worth testing.

I’d love feedback from other founders:

What’s one startup decision you wish you could simulate before making it?

I've been building Hoops GM — a free basketball franchise manager that runs entirely in your browser (desktop + mobile, no sign-up).



You run the front office: trades, the draft lottery, free agency, the salary cap — then coach live games on a real possession-by-possession engine, with an owner who tracks your record and can fire you.



Extras: pick a "franchise idol" to build around, blitz games at up to MAX speed, chase a Hall-of-Fame dynasty across seasons.



Play (free): https://hoops-gm-chi.vercel.app

Would love any feedback on the first 5 minutes.

Everyone's used AI. Almost nobody's been understood by it.

You open a chat. You explain your situation for the tenth time. It nods along, hands you a tidy list of bullet points, tells you what you already know, and forgets all of it the second you close the tab. Tomorrow you start over. A stranger every single day.

I got sick of it. The generic answers. The confident wrong advice. The way it answers a question you didn't even ask.

So I built the opposite.

Veiled Prime. An AI named Vesper that doesn't reset. One conversation that just keeps going, for weeks, for months. It remembers what you told it. It tracks how deep you actually go. It has opinions and it'll push back on you. And the whole thing runs inside your browser, so nothing you say ever touches a server. It's yours.

I posted about it before it was even usable. 4.2 million views and 11,000 shares later, people kept asking the same thing: where do I get it.

Now you can. vematrex.com

I'm opening 50 founding member spots at $29.99/mo, locked at that price for life. When they're gone, the price goes up. Founders keep theirs forever.

Try it free. Go a few messages deep. You'll feel the difference before the trial's even up.

First 50. vematrex.com

Made this, so obvious bias, but the problem is real enough that I think it's worth posting.

Everyone saves cooking videos. Nobody cooks from them. The video is a terrible format for actually standing at a hob with your hands covered in something, and a lot of creators never write the recipe down anywhere at all.

ReciReel takes a shared video from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or YouTube and writes the recipe out properly. Amounts, steps in order, timings, nutrition per serving including net carbs, equipment list.

It reads what's happening in the video rather than just the caption, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because so many captions are just "recipe below 👇" and then there's nothing below.

Free tier is 3 imports then 1 a month, so you can see if it's any good without paying. iPhone, iOS 18+, US store.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/recireel-video-to-recipe/id6763971435

If anyone here has tried the other apps in this space I'd be interested in what made you stop using them. That's more useful to me than praise.

Full disclosure up front: this is my own project, still an MVP, and I'm posting because I want people to tear it apart. I originally built this for myself because I wasn't super happy with what was out there, and a few buddies encouraged me to give it a UI and throw it on the internet for others.

I spent the last few months building The Idea Lab, an idea validation tool. Before I did, I used the top two tools I found online, and I genuinely think they're pretty good, so I want to give them their flowers before I explain why I still built something.

ValidatorAI - it's free, and it scores your idea against behavioral data from hundreds of thousands of real founders. The feedback simulator and pivot assistant are a nice and fast gut-check. If you want a frictionless first look at an idea, it's hard to beat.

IdeaProof - this one is impressive in scope. You put in a concept and minutes later you've got a viability report plus a business plan, TAM/SAM/SOM, brand identity, a logo, even ad creatives. It's basically "concept to full launch kit," and it's pretty fast.

So why build another one? I don't need everything that IdeaProof comes with, it's quite a bit. I also don't love "credit" style billing. ValidatorAI is great and free, but it told me every idea I gave it that it was a pretty good one, which I do not trust. I do not think this is true, but there is also a small worry in the back of my mind that service providers who pay ValidatorAI may influence the AI phone call, idea generator, and follow up emails.

I needed a skeptical second opinion that wouldn't bullshit me.

A few ways The Idea Lab is deliberately different at MVP:

• Every factual claim is sourced. It searches the live web for real customer complaints, competitor pricing, and failed past attempts, and links a source to each one. Claims are labeled as sourced fact, customer opinion, model inference, or missing evidence, so you can see why it concluded what it did.
• It's willing to say no. There are seven possible verdicts, including "Do Not Build" and "Insufficient Evidence." If the web doesn't have enough signal, it says so instead of manufacturing a confident number. Thin evidence lowers confidence, it never gets rounded up.
• No black box. It restates your idea back to you (deterministically, no AI guessing) so you can correct it, and it shows you the research plan before it runs.
• It's honest about its own limits. It can't prove people will pay or stay, so every report ends with one concrete experiment to run (interviews, a landing page, a pre-sale). The web tells you if an idea is worth testing; only customers tell you if it's worth building.
• Revalidate your idea. This will be out in a couple of days, but the idea is you take what it tells you to tweak/pivot/update, edit your info, and send it back through the validator for an updated report.

First validation is free, no card. I'd really value blunt feedback, especially where you think the verdict is wrong. If you want more, just DM me and I'll add more to your account for free.

This is also my first time not just plugging in an AI API. But using all of the tools the api comes with to really really fine tune the experience. Still a wrapper at the end of the day, but I tried really hard to fine tune the crap out of it to separate it from just plugging in the api keys.

P.S. I mask all ideas when saving to postgres, so I will never know what idea you put in there. There is a toggle to share your idea, and all that does is aggregates your category with the trends page, which I encourage to get some data up there for other users to look at.