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 Forge watches the market around it — competitors, communities, complaints — and writes you a brief a week: what changed, what to build next as cards on your board, and a market-fit number that is allowed to go down.
Your first read is free: one product and its first 2 briefs, no card. 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. Forge proposes five to eight things to watch — competitors, adjacent products, the places your buyers complain, the segments they belong to — and you confirm the list; nothing is watched that you did not approve. Your description stays your words, attributed to you.
- 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
What to build next, as cards
A feature two of the companies you watch declare and your description was read as not carrying becomes a card on your board, with their names on it. File a line of the brief onto the same board, type your own, or open the brainstorm — its output is cards too. Nothing is a task: no assignee, no due date, no plan.
- 04
A number that waits until it is earned
Once three companies are watched and two briefs exist, a versioned market-fit reading: the market half read from the web, your half from your own description and the marks you make on it, each component showing its sample and side. Below the floors there is no number — the page says the date it arrives instead.
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 product can be an idea with no repository at all. Describe it, confirm who to watch, and the first brief runs. When the app exists, put its address on the same product; nothing is recreated.
- What arrives each week?
- A brief on Monday: what changed among the companies 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 what Forge composed from it for your board. When nothing material moved, the brief says so in one line.
- Will it give me a score?
- Not on day one. The market-fit number needs at least three watched companies and two briefs; below those floors you get the counts and the date the number arrives, never a confident-looking figure. 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 is read from your description — where it does not say, the row stays out of the sample rather than being guessed — and you can correct any row by hand.
- What does it cost?
- Your first read is free, no card: one product and its first 2 briefs — enough for the market-fit number. After that, Solo is $29 a month flat for up to 3 products, with the weekly brief in the price — no credits, nothing that runs out mid-week.
- Can it read an app I already built?
- Yes — describe it the same way. If you give a repository URL, Forge proposes a draft from the README, once, marked as such and yours to edit or throw away; it does not read your code to say what your product is. The same weekly brief, board and number follow.