By Dairon Canel · Founder, Proven · Updated August 2026
Process
How Proven works
Four steps. Evidence you can check yourself at every stage, not an answer you have to take on faith.
You answer a few questions
A short onboarding flow asks about your idea: who has the pain, what triggers it, and what you are considering building. No account required to start; sign-up happens at the end, once you can see the roadmap Proven built for you.
The more specific you are, the more targeted the evidence will be. A description that names the specific frustration (“agencies spend 2 hours a week chasing client approvals by email”) returns sharper evidence than one that describes the solution (“a tool for client communication”). Describe the pain, not the product.
You get your roadmap
Proven builds a four-phase roadmap for your product: Ideate, Validate, Build, and Launch, each with tools grounded in live evidence rather than AI inference. The whole roadmap is visible from the moment you sign up.
You work through the phases
Run the tools as you need them. Validate fetches live posts from Reddit, Hacker News, and App Store reviews; each post is scored for pain intensity and specificity, so vague frustration gets filtered out and specific, emotionally charged descriptions survive. Build helps you scope what actually ships. Launch maps the communities and angles where your first users already are, built from the same posts that provided the pain evidence.
Every finding links to the original post, so you can judge the evidence yourself instead of taking a score on faith. A weak Pain Score, thin signal volume, and a strong existing competitor are a real result, even if your original description sounded compelling.
A free account covers one idea and a first run of each tool on it. Running a tool again, or adding more ideas, requires a subscription.
It keeps watching
This is where Proven stops being a one-time exercise. A weekly Market Pulse and a recurring Competitor Watch run on your active product on their own, and a recap of what changed lands in your inbox without you having to remember to check. Most tools only move when you open them. These move on their own.
Why Reddit, HN, and App Store reviews?
These three sources have the highest signal-to-noise ratio for what validation actually requires. Reddit is where people describe operational pain in detail, not to network or promote, because they want help or want to vent. The specificity in Reddit threads is unusually high compared to most public platforms.
Hacker News attracts a different audience: developers, technical founders, and early adopters who describe problems at a more systemic level. HN threads about a given pain often surface the “why does nobody solve this properly” perspective, which is exactly the signal a founder needs before choosing a wedge.
App Store reviews are the most underused source for B2B validation. When someone takes the time to write a review of a competitor's product, they are describing what they needed that they did not get: specific features, missing integrations, pricing frustrations, support failures. That is competitive intelligence and customer insight in one place, and most founders never read it systematically.
Frequently asked questions
What if there's no evidence for my idea?
The tools will say so honestly: a low Pain Score, thin signal volume, and a clear result, not an error. The absence of evidence is information. It means your market isn't visibly expressing this pain in the sources Proven searches, which is worth knowing before you build.
Which subreddits does Proven search?
There's no fixed list. The pipeline identifies relevant communities based on the pain you described, searching both broad startup and SaaS communities and the niche subreddits where your specific market is most likely talking.
Can Proven search LinkedIn or X (Twitter)?
Not currently. Reddit, Hacker News, and App Store reviews are the highest signal-to-noise public sources for market pain. LinkedIn conversations skew promotional; X is high-volume but low-specificity. Proven uses sources where people describe problems in detail, which is the signal that matters.
How current is the evidence?
Each tool fetches posts live at the moment you run it, not from a cache. Running the same tool months apart can return different evidence, which is useful for tracking how a market is changing, and part of why the recurring market scans exist.
Does Proven stop mattering after I launch?
No. Launch includes tools that keep running after you ship: a weekly Market Pulse on your market and a Competitor Watch on your active product, with a recap of what changed sent to your inbox. Most tools only move when you open them. These move on their own.
See what a subscription includes or understand how the Pain Score is calculated.
Written by Dairon Canel with AI assistance for research and structure.