Founder planning instrument

Rough ideas become buildable plans.

IdeaClyst runs a structured council between Claude and Codex on your machine. It researches the market, lets each role challenge the other, and writes a planning packet you can build from.

  • Local-first
  • Web research
  • Five-step council

Why a council

A debate gives you a plan.

One prompt gives an answer. IdeaClyst gives each model a job, makes them read each other, and keeps the disagreement visible until the recommendation is clear.

Claude

The skeptical founder

Pressure-tests the idea, looks for the wedge, calls out weak demand, and asks what should be cut before anyone builds.

Product strategy

Codex

The pragmatic CTO

Designs a buildable MVP, names the data model and services, and flags any strategy that becomes expensive in code.

Technical architecture

Synthesis

The argument has to resolve

The final packet keeps the tradeoffs, but it does not leave you with a maybe. It chooses a direction and the next proof step.

Founder packet

How it works

Research first, then five council steps.

Each step writes to disk as it completes. The run is local-first, readable, and designed to degrade gracefully when a browser or source is not available.

00

Web research

Scout the market

Competitors, demand signals, and source notes ground the council before the models speak.

01

Product strategy

Shape the wedge

Claude turns the raw idea into a focused customer, offer, and risk map.

02

MVP architecture

Make it buildable

Codex designs the smallest useful release and calls out technical traps.

03

Critique

Attack the architecture

The product lens asks what is too large, too slow, or not tied to proof.

04

Critique

Attack the strategy

The engineering lens asks which assumptions are costly or infeasible for an MVP.

05

Synthesis

Deliver the packet

The debate resolves into a recommendation, backlog, risks, validation tests, and prompts.

What you get

A founder planning packet in five parts.

The packet is structured for the next week of work, not for a slide deck nobody opens again.

01

Summary

The recommended product, the customer, and the reason to build this version first.

02

MVP backlog

An ordered list of the smallest valuable release, ready for a coding agent.

03

Risks

The assumptions that can break the plan, paired with practical mitigations.

04

Validation tests

Concrete experiments, success metrics, and kill criteria for the first proof loop.

05

Next prompts

Prompt handoffs for product, design, engineering, validation, and follow-up research.

Files

Markdown on disk

Every run writes readable artifacts locally, including research notes and the founder brief.

Research and discovery

The council starts with evidence.

A headless browser scouts competitors and source lanes before the council starts. You can also ask IdeaClyst to find candidate ideas in a market before you promote one to a full run.

Research toolkit

Turn pages into founder tools

Sources become a dossier, competitor matrix, opportunity map, validation experiments, distribution plan, kill criteria, and a one-page founder brief.

Best effort

Idea discovery

Find ideas worth judging

Name a market and a goal. IdeaClyst looks for complaints, fresh launches, and gaps, then ranks buildable candidates with clear kill criteria.

Market scan

Promotion

Send a candidate to council

The selected report carries its thesis, founder fit, core offer, and roast verdict into a full planning run.

One path

Workspace

Find, validate, build, and learn.

IdeaClyst is more than a generator. It keeps a local library of ideas, reports, decisions, validation outcomes, and build-ready specs.

Profile

Rank ideas for the founder

A founder profile adds skills, capital, time, risk tolerance, and unfair advantages to discovery and ranking.

Evidence

Track conviction as proof arrives

Claims, experiments, and validation outcomes move the score. Stale evidence gets sent back to research.

Decision log

Keep assumptions from evaporating

Open assumptions and council disagreements become inspectable memory for the next run.

Build queue

Turn a verdict into work

A council verdict compiles into requirements, tasks, GitHub issues, and status visible in operations.

Intelligence suite

Decision tools around the council.

The surrounding tools help compare bets, listen for market changes, and move from a plan to a proof loop without losing provenance.

  • Opportunity graph See duplicate ideas, whitespace, tags, adjacent markets, and every sourced fact in one map.
  • Watchtower Monitor competitor pricing and positioning changes, then score the ones that affect your assumptions.
  • Validation loop Pre-commit kill rules, record experiment outcomes, and force reality to override a stale plan.
  • Exports Create investor one-pagers, founder updates, PRDs, and validation microsites from the same source trail.