--- name: demand-validation description: >- Test an idea against the cheapest evidence that could kill it — search demand, sustained ad spend, posted salaries, and the words buyers use — and return a verdict with the number that decides it. Use when: Before a build decision, when the question is whether the market exists at all. Use positioning-teardown instead if you already know the market exists and the question is who you are up against. --- # Is there real demand for this? **The job.** I have an idea. Tell me whether anyone is already paying to solve this, before I spend a quarter building it. **The method.** Todd Jackson's four Ps and levels of product-market fit, with Bob Moesta's four forces used to explain why the demand exists rather than only that it does. **What it costs.** A disciplined run is about 14 billed calls, $2.80 at 20¢ per successful call. Stop at 25 ($5.00) — past that you are confirming, not learning. Failed calls are not charged, and reading this playbook is free. **Tools it uses.** `keyword_ideas`, `keyword_suggestions`, `domain_rankings`, `keyword_volume`, `keyword_intent`, `ads_advertisers`, `ads_creatives`, `ads_meta_advertisers`, `ads_meta_library`, `web_search`, `company_jobs`, `social_reddit_posts`, `social_reddit_comments`, `app_reviews`, `keyword_history` Each one is `GET https://wutheringai.com/v1/?…&token=`. The live list, with every parameter, is at https://wutheringai.com/v1. **Inputs.** idea (required) — The product or idea to test, in one or two sentences. audience — Who it is for, if you have a view. A role and a company size is enough. competitor — One competitor domain you already know of. Saves the run its first two calls. market — Country to measure, if not the United States. Search demand varies sharply by country. None were supplied on this request, so the placeholders below are yours to fill. **Deliver.** A verdict — validated, refuted, or inconclusive — the single number that decides it, the two strongest pieces of evidence for, the strongest against, and the cheapest next call that would change your mind. --- ## The idea under test ## Before you spend a call Write down the four Ps — Todd Jackson's frame for what you are actually claiming. Doing this first is what makes the data falsifiable rather than decorative, because each P names the evidence that would refute it. PERSONA who specifically has this problem — a role, not a market PROBLEM what they are doing today instead, and what it costs them PROMISE the one outcome you would put on the homepage PRODUCT the smallest thing that could deliver that promise Then write the number that would make you walk away, before you know it. A threshold chosen after the data arrives is not a threshold. **THE EVIDENCE LADDER.** Rank every signal by what it would cost someone to fake. Prefer signals higher up, and never let a lower rung outvote a higher one: 1. Money someone is paying a competitor, or sustaining ad spend 2. Salary a company is paying humans to do this job 3. Search commercial-intent queries with real, repeated volume 4. Time people build workarounds — spreadsheets, templates, macros 5. Attention views, engagement, followers, upvotes 6. Words someone said they would like it. Never sufficient on its own. Rungs 1 and 2 cost money to fake. Rung 6 costs nothing, which is why so much of it exists. **FINDING URLS.** Several tools take a URL and cannot search for one — `social_linkedin_posts`, `social_reddit_posts`, `social_reddit_comments`, `company_jobs`, `company_person`, `web_fetch`. When you need a page, find its URL with YOUR OWN web search first, using a site: filter. That costs nothing and is exact. `web_search` does the same job for a billed call and is the fallback when you have no search of your own. Never construct a URL from a company name: a wrong URL comes back as a dead page, which reads as an absence of evidence rather than as your mistake. **BATCHING.** The keyword tools bill once per call however many terms you send — `keyword_volume` takes 1,000, `keyword_intent` 1,000, `keyword_overview` 700, `keyword_ideas` 200. Pool your terms and send them in one call rather than looping. A batch whose rows exceed one response comes back trimmed and says how many rows it held versus returned: size the next batch from that figure and send the terms you did not get. A term missing from a trimmed response was withheld, NOT measured at zero. Scoring it as zero is the single most common way one of these runs reaches a confident wrong answer. ## The method — cheapest killer first ### 1. Harvest the language. Do not invent keywords, find them. - `keyword_ideas` on 3–5 seed terms taken from the PROBLEM, not from your product name. Buyers search their problem; only your existing customers search your category. - `keyword_suggestions` on whichever seed came back richest, for the long specific phrases where intent lives. - If you named a competitor: `domain_rankings` on their domain returns the terms they already win, which is the vocabulary of people who are already buying this. Collect every candidate term. Do not price them yet, and do not filter them by taste — the term you would never have written is the one worth finding. ### 2. Price the whole set in as few calls as it takes. - `keyword_volume` on everything you harvested. - `keyword_intent` on the same list. Commercial and transactional intent with volume is demand. Informational volume alone is an audience, which is a different and much harder business. **KILL CRITERION.** If the commercial-plus-transactional cluster totals under ~5,000 searches/month — or under ~1,000 for a B2B tool, where a buyer is worth 5–10× a consumer — stop here and say so. That is a real finding and it cost you four calls. Report it as a finding, not as a failure to find something. ### 3. Look for money. This is the top rung, so reach it early. - `ads_advertisers` on your two clearest competitor names or on the money terms themselves. - `ads_creatives` on any advertiser it returns. Note `first_shown` and `last_shown` on every creative and compute the run length yourself. - `ads_meta_advertisers` on a competitor's domain if the buyer is a consumer or a small business, where the spend goes to social rather than to search. It dates their Meta ads and hands back a `page_id`; `ads_meta_library` on that id renders the creatives. A creative running 90+ days means their acquisition arithmetic works at that message and that price. Nobody sustains a losing ad for a quarter. Note: in the advertiser results the `title` field is the ADVERTISER NAME, not the ad headline. ### 4. Look for salary. A posted band is what this problem is worth today. - Find open roles with your own web search (`site:linkedin.com/jobs/view ""`), or `web_search` if you have none. - `company_jobs` on the two or three listings that look most revealing. Each call reads ONE listing, so choose rather than sweep. Roles clustered on one function reveal the roadmap. A posted salary band is the price of solving this problem with humans, which is the ceiling on what software can charge for solving it without them. ### 5. Listen for the four forces. Bob Moesta's frame: a switch happens when PUSH (frustration with today) plus PULL (attraction to the new) beats ANXIETY (fear of switching) plus HABIT (what they would have to stop doing). Most ideas die on anxiety and habit, which is why "they said they loved it" and "they did not buy it" coexist so often. - Find where the buyer gathers with your own search, then `social_reddit_posts` on the threads, and `social_reddit_comments` on the one thread that is clearly the canonical complaint. - `app_reviews` with `sort_by=most_recent` if a mobile competitor exists. Read the 1- and 2-star reviews first: a paying customer taking the time to complain is the strongest words-rung evidence there is. Quote them verbatim. The exact phrasing is the finding — a paraphrase loses the word the buyer would type into a search box. ### 6. Check the trend before concluding. - `keyword_history` on your top 5 commercial terms. Distinguish a durable shift from a spike. A rising term with no advertisers is either early or worthless. Say which you think it is and why, and name what would tell the two apart. ## The bar Validated only when ALL of these hold. If one fails, say which: - **Reach** — a commercial-intent cluster above ~5,000/mo, or ~1,000/mo B2B - **Triangulation** — it survived a kill attempt from at least TWO independent families (search, ads, hiring, marketplace reviews, social) - **Explanation** — the story of why this demand exists survived the data - **Forces** — you can name the push and the pull, and you have a plan for the anxiety and the habit - **Priced** — you have a CAC band from real CPCs, not a guess "Promising" is not a verdict. **RULES THAT MAKE THE OUTPUT TRUSTWORTHY** - Cite the tool and the argument behind every number you state. - Distinguish measured (a tool returned it) from inferred (you reasoned to it). - State the strongest evidence AGAINST your conclusion before your conclusion. - Absence of a signal is not evidence of absence. Name which instrument was blind and why. - Coverage is public data and varies by query, country, and date. A thin result is a thin result, not an empty market. - If the data does not settle it, say INCONCLUSIVE and name the one call that would settle it. An unspent budget and an uncertain answer at the same time is a failed run; so is a confident answer the data did not support. ## Deliver The verdict. The one number that decides it. The two strongest pieces of evidence for, and the strongest against, stated before your conclusion. Then the single cheapest call that would change your mind — and make it a call this API can actually serve.