Check your idea
Would it work?Check the evidence before you build.
Chatbots call every idea brilliant. We show who already built it and what users complain about, with links.
Learn from case studies
How real indie products found traction, or didn't. All sourced.
- TypingMindAI tools
A weekend ChatGPT front-end that grew past $1M a year
Domain bought 2 March 2023, MVP out 6 March, $10K revenue by 10 March, all from a weekend project.
- fly.pieter.comVibe-coded
A vibe-coded game that hit '$1M ARR' in 17 days, then $0
Started 22 February 2025, built mostly live on X with AI coding tools.
- Cal AIConsumer apps
A photo calorie counter that MyFitnessPal bought within two years
Launched May 2024; the founder told TechCrunch it had 5M+ downloads in eight months and $2M+ revenue in one month (TechCrunch couldn't verify).
More research
Case studies
ShipFast: a Next.js boilerplate built in a week that made $6,000 in 48 hours
Marc Lou packaged code he kept rewriting for his own apps into a boilerplate. It made $6K in two days and $220K in about four and a half months.
TrustMRR: built in under 24 hours as a reply to one tweet, $20,378 in 3 days
Marc Lou built a verified-revenue leaderboard after Pieter Levels complained about fake MRR screenshots. Ad slots sold out in three days.
Tally: a free form builder that grew to $5M ARR, fully bootstrapped
Tally launched in 2020 with a generous free tier and a 'Made with Tally' badge. Five years later it passed $5M ARR with 11 people.
Plausible Analytics: $1M ARR with no ads, by picking a fight with Google
A two-person open-source analytics tool took 324 days to reach $400 MRR, then grew to $1M ARR through blog posts that hit the Hacker News front page.
HeadshotPro: AI headshots, $10M+ in revenue, with affiliates as a growth engine
Danny Postma launched HeadshotPro in 2023 and grew it into an AI headshot studio with $10M+ lifetime revenue. Affiliates bring in $50K+ a month.
Photo AI: Pieter Levels' AI photo studio built on plain PHP and jQuery
How Photo AI went from launch in February 2023 to $61,808 per month by July, with a tech stack most developers would call outdated.
How a check works
An evidence check, not a pep talk
- 01
Describe the idea
One or two sentences. Who it's for and what it does.
- 02
We gather public evidence
Search queries run against GitHub repositories and Hacker News stories and comments.
- 03
Read a sourced report
Verdict, similar products, real complaints, risks and the smallest version to build. Every claim links to its source.
Every claim is linked
If a statement can't point to a public source, it doesn't go in the report.
Thin evidence is called thin
"Not enough data" is an honest answer, and we give it instead of guessing.
Private by default
Idea reports live at an unguessable, noindex URL and are never listed publicly.