Brutally critique my startup idea
Get the objections a skeptical investor would raise, before you spend six months finding them yourself.
- Use it for
- Founders pressure-testing an idea before committing real time to it.
Ask a model what it thinks of your startup idea and it will tell you the idea is promising, list some considerations, and wish you luck. That's not a critique — it's politeness wearing the costume of analysis, and it costs you months.
This prompt removes the escape routes. It assigns a hostile role, forbids balanced summaries, demands the objections be ranked by how fatal they are, and asks specifically what would have to be true for the idea to work — which is the question that actually changes decisions.
Did this work?
At least one objection lands hard enough that you change the idea, narrow it, or decide not to build it.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.