AI-Powered Startup Validation Tool

A free CTO-level startup assessment we built for ourselves: it gives non-technical founders useful technical and business feedback, and creates a qualified entry point into our CTO Sprint service.

Try Startup Check for free

 

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Project snapshot

 

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The situation

We wanted a genuinely useful free tool for techlead.fit, not another downloadable checklist or a plain "book a call" button.

 

The goal was to give founders something with immediate value while also helping us identify people who were actually preparing to build a technical product.

 

The target was specific: founders without a technical background who have a real product idea and are approaching the point where they need to make technical and development decisions.

 

Those founders need answers to questions like:

• Is the idea defined enough to build?

• What are the biggest gaps?

• What has to be clarified before development?

• What should be built first?

• What could this require in time and budget?

• Is the product technically feasible?

• What risks should the founder plan for?

 

That pointed to Startup Check: a free assessment that asks the founder questions, analyses the answers, and produces a structured startup report. The live tool frames its output around market fit, buildability, budget and timeline, and what to build first.

 

The challenge

The hard part was serving two goals at once without compromising either.

The tool had to be useful enough that a non-technical founder finished it feeling they had learned something real, and structured enough that we could tell, from the answers, whether this was a founder who was genuinely close to needing a technical partner. 

It also had to do that with as little friction as possible. Every extra step before value is a step where a qualified founder leaves.

 

Decisions before code

Before development started, we deliberately took things out. Most of the value here was in what we chose not to build.

Make it a conversation, not a form. Asking a founder to talk about their startup should feel more natural than filling in a long technical questionnaire. A chat-native flow collects what the system needs while keeping the experience simple for someone with no technical background, and it removed the need for a complicated interface.

No account. Requiring registration before use would add friction at exactly the point where we want people to start.

No payment. The tool is free. Its job is to provide value, validate the product, and surface qualified founders.

No native app. There is no reason to make someone install anything to validate an idea. Web is easier to reach, easier to promote, and lower friction.

No dashboard. A dashboard adds complexity without solving the real task, which is simple: have the conversation, receive the report.

No manual review. The assessment is automated, so it runs at scale and stays consistent, with no person reviewing each idea before the report is generated.

More than one AI provider. Different models suit different tasks, so Startup Check uses two providers and different model capabilities depending on the job, choosing the most appropriate one for each step rather than forcing everything through a single model.

CRM connected from the start. Qualified leads move into the existing team workflow, so lead generation is not separated from the sales process.

Feedback collection in version one. The product itself needs validating. There was no reason to wait until we called it "finished" before asking users whether it was actually useful.

 

What Startup Check evaluates

Startup Check does not return a single generic AI opinion. The assessment looks across the parts of a startup that decide whether it should be built and how: market, competition, customer, pricing, business model, technical feasibility, MVP scope, and risks.

It goes past just naming problems. The report proposes a starting point, a timeline, and a roadmap, so a founder walks away with something concrete enough to act on and to discuss with a technical partner.

 

The build

The MVP was built in 10 days as a single development sprint. Non-technical planning and design happened before it and took under two days.

The team was one CTO, one developer, and one designer.

The technology was chosen for speed, predictability, and keeping the product simple:

• Next.js for a fast, predictable web frontend.

• Directus as the headless backend layer.

• PostgreSQL as the relational database.

• Two AI providers, with different model options, so each task uses the most suitable model.

• Email to deliver the finished report to the founder.

• CRM connection so qualified prospects are identified and followed up by the team.

The stack matters, but the more important decision was keeping the whole product focused on one user journey: have the conversation, get the report.

 

Release and validation

We did not treat the project as finished when the software went live. The next question was whether it works with real founders.

We drove traffic to Startup Check through direct messaging, advertising, the website, and organic reach, and we measure the whole journey: traffic source, visitors, chats started, completion rate, on-site behaviour and heatmaps, reports generated, leads, qualified leads, conversion, and user feedback.

Every stage of that funnel tells us what to change next.

 

Outcome

This chart shows startup validation tool visitors in June of 2026

The first four weeks produced 15 qualified leads and 2 CTO Sprint conversions, approximately €9,000 in current customer value.

First four weeks of Startup Check, from our analytics and CRM. Sensitive fields anonymized.

In its early weeks Startup Check produced both kinds of validation we were looking for.

Product validation: founders complete the assessment, generate reports, and give feedback on whether it helped.

Commercial validation: the tool surfaces founders who match the target profile, non-technical founders with a real product in mind who are close to making build decisions, and moves them into the CTO Sprint pipeline.

 

What we learned

Not all the feedback was positive, which is useful.

Some founders received an assessment that showed gaps in their planning. For some that was valuable. For others it was frustrating, because they believed they were ready to launch within days and the tool showed the project needed significantly more preparation first.

That is exactly what we wanted Startup Check to surface. The point is not to tell every founder "your startup is great, go build it." The point is to show what is actually missing before the founder spends real money on development, because catching a planning gap early prevents far more expensive mistakes later.

The same principle applies to the tool itself. We built the first version quickly, released it, and started collecting real data instead of spending months chasing a theoretically perfect product. The next iterations are driven by user behaviour, feedback, and data, then another validation cycle.

 

Why this is a techlead.fit case study

Startup Check is not a client project. It is our own internal product, and that is the point.

We built it the same way we build for clients: we started from a real business problem, made the product and technical decisions before development, built only what was necessary, released, measured real behaviour, and used the results to decide what to change next.

Understand the problem. Make the important decisions before development. Build only what is necessary. Release. Measure. Improve.

That is the process we bring to client work, applied to our own product where you can see every step.

 

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Looking for technical direction before development?

If you have a startup idea but are not sure what should be built, what it could require, or what needs to happen before development starts, Startup Check is free to use.

If you already have a product and need a technical plan, architecture, roadmap, or development direction, that is where a CTO Sprint comes in.

Start with Startup Check