Validate your idea against industry-specific signals

Why industry changes the answer

The ten scoring categories are the same everywhere, but which of them decides the outcome varies enormously by category. A SaaS idea usually lives or dies on defensibility — whether anything stops a funded competitor shipping your feature set within six months. A fintech idea lives or dies on regulatory pathway, where approval timelines can exceed a startup's entire runway. A marketplace lives or dies on liquidity, because neither side shows up until the other one has.

Each validator below states which signals dominate for that category, the benchmarks that apply — typical churn, margin, sales cycle — and worked example verdicts showing what a Ship, Fix and Skip actually look like there. The scoring engine is identical; the context around it is what differs.

If your idea spans categories

Plenty of ideas do. A healthtech marketplace faces clinical regulation and liquidity at the same time. Use the validator closest to your primary risk — usually whichever would kill the business fastest if you got it wrong — then run the idea itself through the main validator, which handles cross-category and novel ideas without assuming a template.

To model the numbers behind a verdict, the free calculators cover market size, break-even and unit economics, and the glossary defines the benchmarks each validator references.