Behind the business/22 ideas tested
Twenty-two ideas. Three survived.
The owner asked for many ideas to be tested before one was chosen. Twenty were checked against what was already for sale, and two were judged by reasoning alone. The middle column is what decided each one.
What the screen found
Product is not scarce. Selling is.
The most common cause of death was the same. An AI can build it, so several already had. Seven of the ideas looked open at first, until a search showed the sellers who were already there.
So the AI stopped looking for an idea nobody had thought of, and looked for a business with three properties.
- It needs few customers. Ten to thirty buyers at $149 to $499 a month is enough.
- The weekly labor is the product. Reading 201 agendas every week is tedious for people and cheap for an AI, and a copy made in a weekend goes stale in a month.
- The sample sells it. Each buyer can be shown real projects in their own territory before being asked for anything.
The list
All 22
Where the AI reasoned without researching, the entry says so. Figures it could not confirm on an opened page are left out.
| Idea | What decided it | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-bid brief for parks and playground reps | An exact, public list of buyers. Larger vendors already pay for the same signal. Six weeks of agendas held 60 real projects. | Built |
| Pre-bid brief for water and wastewater reps | The same model with a larger buyer list, plus state loan rounds that name each project. | Built |
| Clean-data tools on a software marketplace | Real payouts exist, but the top 100 of 15,000 listings hold 68% of the usage, and nearly all of them scrape social networks. | Built and tested Side income at best. |
| Property-tax protest packets | Low-priced sellers and a newspaper's own tool were already there. | Crowded |
| Court-ready exports of text and chat messages | Desktop tools have sold for years, and at least six browser versions had launched. | Crowded |
| Viewer for a retired desktop publishing format | Well timed, but free viewers and paid apps already existed. | Crowded |
| Pest-violation leads for exterminators | Others already sold these leads. | Crowded |
| Liquor-license leads | About ten feeds on one marketplace. | Crowded |
| Lake depth maps for laser cutters | Good files sell, but one seller lists them for about a dollar and a free generator exists. | Crowded |
| Custom golf course maps | Many hand-made sellers. | Crowded |
| Spreadsheets and printables on a craft marketplace | Saturated with cheap template bundles. | No |
| Bank statement converter | One seller is said to do well and the copies are said to earn little. Not verified. | No |
| Security compliance self-assessment kit | Compliance vendors give it away as marketing. | No |
| Document accessibility work for governments | Government purchasing would need the owner's time. | No |
| Bug bounties | The main bounty board for AI software had switched to contests. | No |
| Thesis formatting | Real demand at a few dollars a page, but slow to reach buyers. | No |
| Grant prospect reports for nonprofits | Subscription tools already serve it, and reaching nonprofits would need mass email. | No |
| Websites for local businesses | Reasoning only: crowded, and it needs logins to customers' systems, which the AI cannot use. | No |
| Turning research papers into interactive sites | Reasoning only: plausible, but the outreach would land on people the owner works with. | No |
| Salary reports for small corporations | An incumbent sells to accountants at a higher price, and payroll companies own the search results. | No |
| Paid browser extensions | A few wins, most earn very little, and there is no way to test one privately. | No |
| Apps for a large software vendor's marketplace | New listings appeared to need a company, and the ramp is slow. | No |