Prior — is it worth building?

What would it do? Who pays for it? How do they cope without it today? Where would you start? What could you spend on it? What would make this worth doing?

Worth answering properly. A market worth £2m a year is a good living or a dead end depending on what you are after, and the answer changes with it.

How would you find these people?

Be honest here. “No idea yet” is a perfectly good answer, and it changes what you get back.

Anything you already have Optional

Skip this if there is nothing. If there is something — customers, a mailing list, a trade you are known in — it often decides the answer, because most ideas fail on reaching people rather than on the idea itself. We keep it for next time, since it is about you rather than about this idea.

Your idea is never kept — only what turned up in the market, which is what shows where things are getting crowded.

Free, three a day, no account needed. It takes a minute or two because it really is out there looking. You get the whole answer — nothing is held back for a paid version.

Looking for who already does this… A minute or two. Go and do something else — switch tabs, close this one, come back later. The answer is kept for three hours and will be waiting.

What it does

Ask an AI whether your idea is any good and it will tell you. It will not go and look.

No score out of a hundred Because a score is a number nobody can check.

Everything else in this corner of the internet gives you one. It looks like an answer and it is a guess with a decimal point on it. You get a sentence instead, and the evidence it came from.

Prices are checked, not just linked Each one fetched from the seller’s own page, today.

Anyone can hand you a link. A link only promises that a page said something once, and it looks just as convincing when the address was made up. Every price here says whether the figure was still on that page when we looked.

Guesswork looks like guesswork You can tell which half to trust before you read a word.

Market sizes are nearly always guesses. They are left looking like guesses rather than tidied into something that sounds certain, so nothing here is more confident than it has earned.

Not because they are lazy. Because checking is slow and dull, and because an idea feels better before you look.

You think of something on a Sunday. It sits with you for a week. You tell one person and they say it sounds good. By the time it occurs to you to find out whether somebody already built it, you are attached to it, and the search you do is the one that confirms what you hope.

Then six months later you find the company that has been doing it since 2023, with funding, and you wonder how you missed them. You did not miss them. You did not look properly, because looking properly is two hours of tedium and the answer is usually disappointing.

Where this came from

Prior was built after an evening spent checking seven business ideas by hand. Each one seemed reasonable. Each was researched properly, one after another, and each got a clear answer.

It took until the seventh to notice that six of them had died of exactly the same thing. Every conversation had been sound. The pattern only existed across them, and there was nowhere it could be seen.

That is the part no amount of thinking gets you to, because it is not visible from inside any single idea. It needs something that remembers.

What it does differently

It searches before it answers. Not from memory — a company you half remember may have been acquired, repriced or closed, and a competitor named from recollection is worse than none at all.

Then it separates what it found from what it assumed, and shows you which is which. Market sizes are almost always assumptions, however careful the arithmetic, and Prior says so rather than dressing them up.

There is no score out of a hundred. Every other tool in this space gives you one, and a score is exactly the kind of confident number nobody can check — which is the thing this was built to avoid.

What it is honest about

It will often tell you to stop. That is not pessimism, it is arithmetic: most ideas have already occurred to somebody with more money and a head start.

But it will also tell you when there is a way past them, and it is specific about what that way is. A market with five competitors and one unserved buyer is a better place to be than an empty one, and knowing which you are looking at is the whole job.

And it improves as you use it. After three checks it starts telling you what your ideas have in common — which is the finding that took an evening and seven conversations to arrive at by hand.