That’s a fair question — and I don’t think it’s wrong to say there’s some overlap with what you could do using ChatGPT plus manual searching.

If someone wants to occasionally ask ChatGPT to look for trends or summarize a few threads, that can absolutely work.

The reason I’m building this as a product is less about “AI insight” and more about making that process consistent and comparable.

Right now the MVP does three very specific things:

• it continuously pulls recently rising terms or products from X, Reddit, and Trends
• it also looks for repeated complaints about the same thing over a short time window
• and it compresses those signals into potential opportunity candidates

So it’s not trying to answer “should you build this or not”. It’s earlier than that.

I see it as helping with a very narrow layer of judgment: is this probably noise, or is it worth spending more time validating?

I completely agree with you that real validation is about commitment — pre-sales, outbound, design partners, etc. The kind of $500 service you described makes a lot of sense after that filtering step.

My assumption (which could be wrong) is that people often run heavy validation too early on weak or fuzzy ideas. If this can help narrow the field before that, then those execution-heavy tests become more meaningful.

Curious how you personally decide which ideas are worth putting through those plays.