DogFoodMe

I have shipped products for eight years and the pattern repeats everywhere. Someone falls in love with an idea, builds for months, launches to silence. The answer was available on day one; they just never asked. I wanted the asking to be the easy part. Cheaper than a landing page, faster than a survey, more honest than your friends.

DogFoodMe is also where my building era started. It was the first product I ever built alone, and my first project with Claude Code. Everything I have shipped since stands on what this one taught me.

1. 01

   Plain words in. You describe what you want to build and who it is for. No pitch deck. Five minutes.

2. 02

   AI reads it from three angles. Complexity, competition, and willingness to pay. It also pulls real customer voice from Reddit and X, so the verdict comes from people, not vibes.

3. 03

   Refining the validation prompt. The verdict is only as good as its prompt. I kept rewriting it against real submissions, tightening it every time it flattered a weak idea, until the scores earned trust.

4. 04

   Payments, learned live. I wired up Razorpay for payments, my first payment integration ever. Webhooks, failed states, refunds: the unglamorous half of shipping alone.

5. 05

   Real testers, not your mom. Pre-vetted beta testers who match your market try the idea and tell you the truth. They get lifetime deals on the products they help shape.

6. 06

   A one-week decision. Build it, change it, or drop it. Any of the three is a win, because the decision now costs a week instead of a year.

The AI verdict alone was not enough; founders trusted the Reddit and X quotes far more than the score. When you build research tools, surface the humans. The model should hand you evidence, not conclusions.