I analyzed a bunch of startup ideas before building anything. Most failed for the same reasons.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how often founders jump straight into building before really stress-testing the idea.

A lot of ideas sound great in the beginning, but when you start looking at the fundamentals, they fall apart pretty quickly.

Recently I started running different app ideas through a simple evaluation framework before even thinking about building anything. I try to look at things like:

• Is the problem actually painful enough for people to care? • Are there already 10 companies solving it better? • Is there a clear way to make money from it? • Does the idea rely on users behaving in unrealistic ways?

What surprised me is how many ideas fail because of human behavior, not technology.

For example:

Idea: Rent-a-Friend app (hire someone to attend events with you) Problem: Trust, safety, and awkward social dynamics would make adoption difficult.

Idea: Airbnb for parking spaces Problem: Regulations and inconsistent supply would make scaling hard in most cities.

Idea: AI that reads dating texts to detect if someone is losing interest Problem: Privacy concerns and questionable accuracy would make many people hesitant to use it.

In a lot of cases the technology is possible — the business model or user behavior is the real issue.

It made me realize how valuable it is to stress-test an idea early before spending months building something.

Curious how other founders here approach this.

How do you validate a startup idea before committing serious time to it?

Do you talk to users first? Launch an MVP quickly? Or just go with intuition and figure it out later?

Also curious, what’s a startup idea you once thought was brilliant but later realized probably wouldn’t work?