Killing ideas properly#
My idea tracker started like most: a glorified spreadsheet of half-formed thoughts that nobody revisited. The useful part turned out to be killing ideas properly rather than capturing them.
The pipeline#
Startup-Analyser is an open-source, depersonalised fork of a private tool I built for myself: a markdown-and-git pipeline for capturing, scoring and killing venture ideas.
The scoring model is deliberately narrow. Every idea gets rated against six founder-fit constraints and five market dimensions, which places it on a 2x2: Build, Opportunity Gap, Lifestyle or Kill. There's no SaaS dashboard and no database: just Markdown files, git history and a CLAUDE.md that tells an agent how to run the pipeline for you.
Kills#
Most scored ideas end up in Kill, which is expected. A killed idea is only wasted if you learn nothing from it, so every kill adds one step: name the pattern that failed and write it into patterns.md. Over enough cycles that file becomes more useful than any single idea in it. It's a running record of the mistakes in your own thinking, written down clearly enough that you stop making them twice.
Why it's forked#
Startup-Analyser strips out everything specific to me: my own scoring history, my personal context and the provenance of my private knowledge base. What's left is the reusable mechanism, for anyone who wants to run the same discipline against their own ideas.
The fork is open source: github.com/AdenCJM/Startup-Analyser