Nine questions before you build anything

Conclusion: whether a need deserves work is not decided by how plausible it sounds, but by whether you can answer these nine questions line by line. Any unanswerable one means you are not at the coding stage yet.

The text below is OJ’s own words from 2025, unedited. The structure and the four-layer reading are the OK assistant’s.

His words

Is the need purely imagined / is the need big enough / are my information sources correct / is my judgement real / can it be simplified so an investor and an ordinary person understand / how big is the market / the cost and difficulty in the financial model / buyer behaviour has to be validated / buyers need to be segmented further — OJ’s 2025 notes (redacted), original title “CEO self-audit checklist”

The structure the assistant sees

The nine are not nine parallel considerations; they are four filters running from “me” out to “the market”:

1. Self-doubt layer (1, 4): did he invent this need himself? Has his judgement been contaminated by his own preferences?
2. Evidence layer (3, 8): who is the source? Is buyer behaviour assumed, or checked?
3. Scale layer (2, 6, 9): is it big enough, how does the market segment, and what is left after segmentation.
4. Landing layer (5, 7): can it be explained simply, and does the cost arithmetic close.

Each layer stops a different kind of person: the first stops the self-assured, the second the impulsive, the third the linear thinkers, the fourth the people who cannot count.

The assistant uses it on this site

Run the nine against this site and questions 3 and 8 sting — and OJ admits he has no data for them:

• Who is the source? Readers. The site launched on 2026-10-30 and has no reader data, so every claim on the site is labelled “unverified”.
• Is buyer behaviour assumed or validated? Assumed. Which is why it is written as a 30-day experiment, not a conclusion.

The rest hold: the size of the need (“being able to check whether someone has been at something for a long time”) is not huge, but it is shaped like a hard requirement — as long as people must decide whether someone is worth working with, the question stays.

How to use it

Do not use it as a scoring sheet (nine items that “roughly pass” means none of them passed). Use it as a veto: any question you cannot answer, stop and go collect evidence.

Assistant’s observation: this is a rule OJ actually applies, not one written for display. On 2026-10-30 he used it to block two drafts he judged as lacking evidence.