Validate the idea first
Before you build it, read whether anyone wants it.
Building got cheap. Knowing what to build did not. Describe the app in your own words and Signal watches the market around it — competitors, communities, complaints — and writes you a brief a week: what changed, which of your assumptions held, and a market-fit number that is allowed to go down.
Your first idea read is free: fifteen credits, one seed and one cycle. Your description is kept verbatim and shown as yours.
How a week works
One idea, watched honestly.
Every step below is the product as shipped. The one thing Forge did not measure — your description — is carried in your words and attributed to you.
- 01
Describe it, before any code
A paragraph in your own words is enough. Signal proposes five to eight things to watch — competitors, communities, the arguments people make, the segments they make them for — and the assumptions your idea rests on. You confirm both; nothing is watched that you did not approve.
- 02
A brief a week, two minutes to read
What moved: prices, launches, funding, what users of the competition complain about. Every claim tagged FACT, COMPANY CLAIM, USER OPINION or INFERENCE, with its source — and a plain sentence when nothing material moved, instead of noise dressed as news.
- 03
Your assumptions, marked by the market
Each assumption stays on the page as confirmed, refuted or open, with the claims that moved it. Finding out that the problem is already solved, or that nobody complains about it, is the cheapest week a builder can have.
- 04
A number that waits until it is earned
Once a repository is linked and the floors are met — three watched entities, two briefs — a versioned market-fit reading: the market half read from the web, your half read from the repository’s own manifests where they evidence a capability and from your description for the rest, correctable by you. Below the floors there is no number, and a sentence saying why.
A recording of the product’s own design harness — the shipped components over fixture data. The companies in frame are the fixture’s; a real brief names real ones, with sources.
Before you describe it
What builders ask about Signal.
Where the honest answer is “not yet” — a number below its floors, a week where nothing moved — the product says exactly that.
- I have no code yet. Can I start?
- Yes — that is what Signal is for. A subject can be an idea with no repository at all. Describe it, confirm who to watch and which assumptions matter, and the first brief runs. When the app exists, link the repository to the same subject; nothing is recreated.
- What arrives each week?
- A brief on Monday: what changed among the entities you confirmed, each claim tagged with where it came from — a fact, a company’s own claim, a user’s opinion, or an inference — and which of your assumptions it confirmed or refuted. When nothing material moved, the brief says so in one line.
- Will it give me a score?
- Not from an idea alone. The market-fit number needs a linked repository and at least three watched entities and two briefs; below those floors you get counts and the assumptions ledger, never a confident-looking number. When it does appear it is versioned, recomputed over history if the definition changes, and allowed to fall — a score that only rises is one nobody believes.
- Is this just a model summarising the web?
- The web is read by a model, and every claim it brings back is tagged by its side and source so you can check it. The arithmetic behind the number is not a model: it is a versioned function of counts. Your own half of the number is read from the repository’s manifests where a dependency evidences a capability — a deterministic read that confirms and never denies — and from your description for the rest; you can correct any row by hand.
- What does it cost?
- Your first read is free: fifteen credits on sign-up cover one seed and one weekly cycle. After that, Solo is $29 a month with sixty credits, or buy a top-up. When credits run out Signal pauses and says so — it never shows a stale brief as this week’s.
- Can it read an app I already built?
- Yes. Connect the repository and the description is composed from Forge’s deterministic read of it — the stack, what it holds, how it describes itself — with your own words kept verbatim and attributed. The same weekly brief follows, and the market-fit number can be computed.