Ideas are free — the rubric you use to evaluate them is what separates founders who ship from founders who plan.
The fact that these ideas are being shared publicly should tell you something: business ideas, in and of themselves, are worthless. Executing on the idea — turning it into an actual business — is where the blood, sweat, and tears live.
TAM (Total Addressable Market): the total revenue opportunity available for a product or service if it achieved 100% market share. A useful heuristic for founders: if capturing just 1% of your TAM would not produce a thriving business, the market is too small to build a venture-scale company around it.
As Paul Graham has written at length, the idea is just a starting point. What matters is whether a specific team can translate that concept into a product customers actually pay for. The best ideas in the world die in the hands of the wrong team. And mediocre ideas, executed relentlessly by the right people, become real businesses.
That said, ideas are not entirely equal. Some ideas have structural advantages — larger markets, clearer demand signals, stronger moats — that make execution easier. Understanding how to evaluate an idea before you commit years to it is the actual skill worth developing. Understanding the key success factors in modern business starts with being able to stress-test your own assumptions before the market does.
Here are five ideas, each evaluated using the scoring rubric described below. Most of them will get built by someone. The race is on for several of them right now.
HelpGen — Auto-generate and continuously update help content and how-tos for SaaS products. This idea became dramatically more feasible with the emergence of LLMs, which also lowered the barriers to entry. Competitors have made progress, but no one keeps their in-app help content current. There is still an opportunity here for a team that can nail the automated refresh loop.
Follow My Diet — A diet and nutrition tracking app for the GLP-1 era. The question is whether Wegovy and Ozempic have changed consumer behavior enough to kill the traditional diet app market, or whether they have created a new adjacent market for managing nutrition around GLP-1 use. The answer likely depends on the next five years of adoption data.
BestUse — Analyzing every jurisdiction’s zoning rules and every parcel’s highest and best use could not have been automated meaningfully until LLMs arrived. The race is on to build this. Real estate developers, municipalities, and investors all have strong reasons to pay for it. This is the kind of idea where founders who can wear multiple hats — deep domain knowledge plus technical execution — have a real edge over pure software shops.
Run My House — A consumer app that makes it trivial to manage every recurring task around the home: contractors, maintenance schedules, appliance warranties, service history. There have been failures in this space. The business model is hard and the consumer tolerance for friction is low. But the demand is real — anyone who has tried to coordinate a home renovation knows why.
GuideMe — An automated career and guidance counselor, free to students, powered by LLMs to give genuine advice about college, trade programs, and career paths — not just a college admissions funnel. Revenue comes from routing students toward employers, colleges, and career programs willing to pay for qualified leads. The key is making the student experience genuinely useful, not just a lead gen form with better UX.
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The rubric below is a simple 10-point scale. It won’t tell you whether an idea will work — execution does that — but it will tell you which ideas have structural advantages worth betting on.
| Dimension | Points | What earns a high score |
|---|---|---|
| Feasibility of MVP / Market Entry | 2 points | You or your team can build and ship the MVP. Low-code tools help, but they are not a panacea. No MVP means everything else is irrelevant. |
| Revenue Market Size (TAM) | 4 points | If every possible customer signed up, what ARR does that generate? Below $100M = 0–1 pts. $100M–$1B = 2 pts. $1B–$9B = 3 pts. $10B+ = 4 pts. |
| Difficulty, Barriers to Entry, Competition | 2 points | The more difficult to replicate, the better. Low-code tooling has lowered barriers everywhere, which increases competition — defensibility requires something the founder next door cannot copy. |
| Riding Hype or a Trend | 2 points | Is the market segment growing? Does it have the attention of the target industry? Wind at your back helps most with fundraising and M&A. |
If an idea fails on MVP Feasibility or Market Size, it is likely unworkable regardless of its other scores. But it is worth noting that plenty of ideas scoring only 6 or 7 total have been big wins for practical founders.
HiddenLevers itself scored a 6. It reached $8M ARR, ran at a 52% pre-tax profit margin, and sold to Orion at 16x revenue. The lesson is not that the rubric is wrong — it is that a well-executed 6 beats a poorly executed 9 every time. Understanding the tax implications of a successful exit becomes a real concern only after you ship. Focus on shipping first.
The idea itself is almost never the problem. Execution is. A strong idea with a weak founding team, limited resources, or an unsustainable go-to-market almost always fails, while a mediocre idea executed brilliantly by the right team often wins. As Paul Graham has written, ideas are simply a starting point — the real question is whether your team can translate that idea into a product that real customers pay for.
Difficulty is your friend. The more technically or operationally hard something is to build, the harder it is for a competitor to replicate it. Proprietary data, deep integrations, network effects, and regulatory complexity all add moat. The ease of standing up software businesses has dropped dramatically, which paradoxically makes defensibility more important — not less — because competitors can now flood any open market faster than ever.
A useful rule of thumb: if you captured 1% of your total addressable market, would that produce a thriving business? Markets below $100M in total ARR potential score a zero on the rubric — not because small niches cannot generate profit, but because 1% of a small market rarely produces enough revenue to sustain a growth-oriented company. The sweet spot is a market large enough that a small slice is still meaningful.
Building on a trend is almost always easier to fund and sell. Investors and customers alike exhibit herd behavior — they are more comfortable committing when a category already has momentum. A great idea that is 5 years early is functionally the same as a bad idea. Where possible, look for ideas where macro trends are creating new feasibility for problems that previously had no good technical solution.
HiddenLevers scored a 6 out of 10 on the evaluation rubric — below what most investors would consider a compelling opportunity. It succeeded anyway because the founding team executed at a level that exceeded the idea’s theoretical ceiling. They captured a few percent of a small but real market, reached $8M ARR, ran at a 52% pre-tax profit margin, and sold to Orion at 16x revenue. Execution beat idea perfection, as it almost always does.
Praveen Ghanta is a five-time founder and serial entrepreneur. He is the founder of DevHawk.ai, an AI-powered engineering management platform, and Fraction.work, which connects fast-growing companies with top fractional tech and growth marketing talent. Previously, he founded HiddenLevers, a risk analytics platform for wealth management that he bootstrapped from inception to acquisition by Orion Advisor Solutions in 2021, serving thousands of advisors and $600B in assets. He earlier founded SmartWorkGroups, acquired by Intralinks in 2000.
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