The person behind Yibud
About the author
An independent developer who has spent years building, shipping, and quietly invalidating his own startup ideas. Yibud is what survived the lessons.
Last updated · July 27, 2026
Short biography
Who writes here
Yibud is built and written by one person — a software developer who has been shipping small products for the better part of a decade. Some of those products found customers. Most did not. Each one taught the same thing in a different accent: building is the easy part. Knowing whether to build is the hard part.
This site is the consolidation of those lessons. The articles are long because the questions are long. The reports are structured because decision-making is structured. The product is small on purpose — the goal is not to build a platform, but to ship something that genuinely helps someone decide whether the next six months of their life are worth spending on an idea.
I prefer to write under the Yibud name rather than a personal one. Not out of false modesty — the work is what matters, and the work belongs to the project. If you are reading this and considering a similar path: I would rather you find the ideas useful than find the author interesting.
Why Yibud exists
The reason this site exists
Yibud exists because I have watched — in myself and in friends — the same pattern repeat. A clever idea. A few months of building. A quiet launch. A longer quiet. Eventually the project gets parked in a folder somewhere, and life moves on. The pattern is rarely about talent. It is rarely about execution. It is almost always about validating the wrong assumption at the wrong time.
The first version of this tool was a spreadsheet I used to grade my own ideas before committing to them. Then a Notion template. Then a small script. Yibud is what the script grew into. I keep it because every new idea I have still gets run through it — including, occasionally, the ideas that look like they might actually be good. The tool exists because I needed it. The fact that other people seem to need it too is the only reason it is public.
Philosophy
What I believe about startup ideas
Most startup ideas do not die from competition or bad luck. They die from a single false assumption that nobody tested early enough. The work of validation is the work of finding that assumption before you have built around it.
Evidence beats intuition. Not always, and not in every domain — but in the part of starting a company that affects the next six months of your life, evidence is cheaper than conviction and almost always more honest.
A structured score is not a verdict. It is a way of seeing your own idea from the outside — a way of noticing the parts you have been avoiding. The report is most useful when you argue with it.
Yibud is opinionated. The rules encode opinions about which patterns predict traction and which predict trouble. The opinions are evidence-driven but not neutral. Read them as a strong starting hypothesis, not as the truth.
Writing principles
How these articles are written
Every article is built from specific patterns I have observed across the indie launch literature and the projects I have shipped, killed, or quietly let fade. Theory is used sparingly. Practical frameworks and concrete examples are prioritized over abstract advice.
When a claim is empirical — when it can be tested — I try to test it. When a claim is opinion, I mark it as opinion. I do not invent statistics, fabricate founder quotes, or invent company names to make a point land harder. The honest version of an idea is almost always the most useful one.
Articles are updated as new evidence appears. If something I wrote turns out to be wrong, I change it and note the change. The edit history on every article is part of the article. Errors are part of the record, not hidden from it.
Areas of focus
What I write about
Pre-build validation
The cheapest, fastest ways to test whether an idea is worth the next six months of your life — before you write a line of code.
Assumption testing
How to find the single assumption that, if false, would invalidate the entire plan — and how to test it in days, not months.
Distribution & first customers
Realistic customer-acquisition channels for solo founders. No growth-hack theatre, no fake virality — just the channels that actually work for a small team.
Indie founder economics
Pricing, monetization, scope, and the day-to-day math of running a one-person product. The unsexy parts that decide whether you keep going.
Recent writing
Latest articles
The Build-vs-Buy Decision for First-Time Founders: When to Ship Software, When to Pay for It, and the Only Test That Picks
A first-time founder's guide to the build-vs-buy decision — when to pay for an existing SaaS, when to assemble a no-code stack, when to fork an open-source project, when to hire a contractor, and when the only honest answer is to build from scratch. The four-question test that picks the right path, the five situations where the answer is pre-decided, and the six-month read-out that proves which side was right.
How to Size a Market You Can Actually Reach: TAM, SAM, SOM, and the Two Numbers That Are Usually Useless
A founder's guide to estimating the market they can actually reach — what TAM, SAM, and SOM actually mean, why two of the three are usually useless for solo founders, how to do a defensible bottom-up sizing in a single afternoon, where to source the data, and the failure modes that produce a market-size claim a partner or investor will not trust.
How to Write a Smoke-Test Landing Page in 60 Minutes
The shortest path from a hypothesis to a real conversion number — page structure, headline formula, the four signal lines, the seven things to leave off, the 60-minute build checklist, and how to read the conversion data at small N.
How to Position Against an Incumbent: The [for–unlike] Wedge That Holds When a Competitor Already Owns the Category
A founder's guide to writing a positioning wedge when a more-funded, more-distributed competitor already exists in the category — April Dunford's five-component positioning, the four wedge types (segment, persona, capability, distribution), the [for–unlike] sentence template, the five cheap tests that catch a positioning that won't hold, and the failure modes that produce a wedge the team cannot defend in a sales call.
Fake Door Test: How to Validate Demand Without Writing a Single Line of Code
A complete playbook for the fake door (painted door) test — the cheapest credible demand test in the startup validation toolkit. Includes the original methodology from Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz's Lean Analytics, the six-step process, the Unbounce 2024 benchmark that defines what counts as a 'good' smoke-test conversion rate, the two documented case studies (Buffer, Dropbox), the seven failure modes that produce false positives, and what the test cannot prove.
Yibud is written under a project name by design. If you want to reach the person behind it, use the address on the Contact page.
HOW THIS PUBLICATION WORKS
How the writing is held to a standard
EDITORIAL POLICY
How topics get chosen
Our process for picking questions, sourcing claims, and correcting errors after publication.
CONTENT PRINCIPLES
What every article must do
The evidence-first standard every Yibud essay is held to before it ships.
SOURCES
Books and writers we lean on
The reading list that informed this publication.
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