How I validate and kill SaaS ideas for $0 before writing code (I killed 10 in 8 days)

#saas #startup #indiehackers #buildinpublic

I'm a solo dev with basically no budget. Normally I'd just start building and worry about demand later. This time I made myself do the opposite: try to kill the idea on paper, for free, before writing a single line of code.

I ended up with a dumb little routine. For every idea I sit down and answer four questions using nothing but Google and Reddit search.

First, do real people actually complain about this in their own words, or did I just invent the pain in my head? Second, who already owns this space? There's almost always someone, and I force myself to name them. Third, is the gap real, or can anyone solve it for free in five minutes? Fourth, would someone actually pay every month, or is it a one-and-done thing?

If an idea can't survive all four, it's dead. I move on. No code.

I ran 10 ideas through this over about a week and a half. All 10 died. Kind of brutal. But the pattern that showed up was worth more than any single idea.

Anything in a known market was already taken by a funded company. Next to them I'd just be invisible. And anything new enough to still be open had a different problem: almost nobody would pay, or the fix was free to do yourself, or the whole thing would get cloned in a few weeks.

I even found what looked like a cheat code. A hard legal deadline that forces companies to buy something (the EU AI Act, August 2026). It still died, because the thing you actually have to do to comply is free. You just add one sentence.

So here's what changed my mind. For someone with no name and no audience, finding a pain was never the hard part. The hard part is having reach and a paying customer at the same time, and when nobody knows you exist, that combo almost never shows up.

So I'm flipping it. Instead of hunting for the perfect idea alone in a room, I'm going to build a small audience out in the open first and let actual people tell me what they'd pay to get rid of.

I'll post all 10 ideas and exactly why each one died, one at a time. Take the framework if it helps. Tell me where I got it wrong.

And the thing I actually want to ask you: what's the one annoying thing you do every week that you'd happily pay to never do again?