Idea Filter Examples for Technical Founders

Three sanitized examples to lift the pattern from.

Example 1: Dev Tool

• Started with 18 dev-tool ideas.
• F1 (reachability) killed 12: most assumed "Twitter dev community" as channel. Not warm.
• F3 (named buyers) killed 4 more. "All Rails devs" is not three buyers.
• Survivors: a CI debugging tool. Founder had 3 named buyers from a previous job.

Example 2: SaaS API

• Started with 15 API ideas.
• F2 (existing spend) killed 9: novel categories where teams were not paying yet.
• F4 (weekly pain) killed 4 more.
• Survivors: an embeddings cost-optimizer. Weekly cost panic was real.

Example 3: Indie Product

• Started with 22 product ideas.
• F1 killed 18: "go viral on Twitter" was the implicit channel.
• Survivors: a niche newsletter tool. Founder ran a niche newsletter.

What to Steal

Strict reachability test. Specific named buyers. Killing GitHub-star-flavored ideas early.