Executive Summary

Stop Building Blind targets the core problem facing an estimated 20 million early-stage founders and solopreneurs who routinely build products with weak or anecdotal customer evidence, wasting months and tens of thousands of dollars on features that don't land. These teams lack affordable, repeatable ways to recruit interviewees, run structured conversations, and turn qualitative interviews into prioritized, actionable signals rather than noise. The product would be an end-to-end AI-guided customer validation platform: programmatic outreach and low-cost panel recruitment, built-in conversation scripts and recording, automated transcription, LLM- and topic-model-driven analysis that surfaces themes, sentiment, and a validation score, plus a recommended next-experiments roadmap. A self-serve SaaS tier priced around $50/month (roughly $600/year) for solo founders, with add-ons for curated research panels and on-demand expert review, keeps it accessible while enabling multiple revenue streams. The platform should emphasize measurable outcomes—faster time-to-insight and clearer prioritization—rather than raw volume of data. This is an attractive moment: we estimate a $12.0B addressable market driven by three converging trends—AI-driven qualitative analytics that lowers cost-per-insight, a growing indie/solo-founder population demanding lean research, and programmatic outreach that makes recruiting scalable. LLMs and topic modeling materially change the economics of turning interviews into usable product decisions. To stand out you must deliver trustworthy, workflow-first tooling: verifiable panels, transparent AI explanations, human-in-the-loop audit options, and templates that map directly to product decisions and KPIs. The biggest challenges are building a high-quality participant network, mitigating AI bias and privacy risks, and proving ROI versus ad hoc methods; overcoming those will require investment in data quality, compliance, and a clear playbook that converts interview signals into prioritized bets founders can execute.

Market Opportunity

Stop Building Blind — AI-guided customer validation for founders targets a $12.0B = 20M early-stage founders/solopreneurs x $600 annual spend on validation tools, templates, coaching and research panels total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 18% — demand for founder tooling, no-code validation and market-research-as-a-service is expanding as indie startups and accelerators proliferate.

Key trends driving demand: AI-driven qualitative analytics -- LLMs and topic modeling make extracting signals from interviews fast and affordable, lowering cost-per-insight.; Indie/solo-founder growth -- more small teams rely on lean validation rather than big research budgets, creating demand for self-serve validation tools.; Programmatic outreach & cold acquisition -- automated sequences and micro-budgets let early-stage founders recruit interviewees at scale.; Shift to async validation -- founders increasingly use on-demand, remote interviews and micro-surveys rather than expensive in-person research..

Key competitors include UserTesting, Respondent (respondent.io), SurveyMonkey / Momentive, Communities & Workarounds (Indie Hackers / Product Hunt / Reddit / Google Forms).

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Stop Building Blind — AI-guided customer validation for founders

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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