The long tail of ideas you can't get to
A free Idea Validator, and the capacity problem behind every backlog.
A pattern I keep seeing inside companies of every size is the long tail of ideas that never get touched. Last year’s offsite, a workshop with the customer team, the strategy day. Hundreds of ideas, sometimes more, are sitting in a backlog because validating each one is expensive. It takes time, good facilitators, and product capacity that’s already committed to the current roadmap.
A leader at a large retailer described it to me last month as “a long tail of ideas we can’t get to”. That’s not a strategy problem; it’s a validation capacity problem. And it’s the one AI is genuinely well-suited to solve.
That’s why we built the Idea Validator and made it a free public tool, no account needed to try it. Drop an idea in, give it a couple of minutes, and see what comes out the other end.
It produces a Lean Canvas, an XYZ-form hypothesis, and a recommended first experiment. The three hours of room time we used to spend on this becomes about two minutes, and the quality holds because the model is grounded in workshop patterns and real customer interactions, not generic frameworks. It’s a quick way to sample the pretotyping method.
It’s not trying to replace the human judgment work, just to remove the bottleneck that stops most teams from validating more than a handful of ideas a year.
A few practical notes. It’s also exposed as an MCP server, so other agents can call it as a service inside whatever workflow you’re already running. If you want to scale this across the entire backlog, that’s where I help embed this in your teams.
I’ve had great feedback on this so far, and it’s a fun starting point to get that flywheel spinning…