We refuse to ship guesswork.
Most niche-research tools will hand you a confident analysis on any idea you give them. Type in “weapons of mass destruction as a service” and they'll generate a revenue projection.
We won't.
The Detective runs a preflight check before the deep-dive. If the public evidence isn't there, we refuse the spend and tell you three angles you could try instead. If your idea hits a regulated industry, we name the rule and stop. If a niche fails honestly, we say so. That's the bar.
How we got here.
We've spent ten years collectively building SaaS, breaking SaaS, and rebuilding it. We kept running into the same problem: every “niche idea” we evaluated turned into a week of manual research that maybe surfaced one decent lead and three duds.
We tried using LLMs to speed it up. They confidently hallucinated competitors, market sizes, and customer counts. We tried Perplexity. Useful for a search, useless for a verdict. We tried building a real pipeline that grounds every claim in primary sources before it ranks anything. That turned into The Detective.
We are not a research firm. We are a software product that runs a structured pipeline against your specific profile (your skills, your budget, your time, your refusals) and renders a verdict you could ship from on Monday. Or we refuse to render one. Both happen on purpose.
Who we are not.
Two other products use names close to ours and sometimes show up next to us in search. Neither is us.
Aleph by OCCRP is an investigative-journalism platform used by data reporters to map relationships across leaked documents. Different problem, different audience.
Detective by Charm is a B2B sales-intelligence tool for outbound teams chasing prospect intel. Also different problem, also different audience.
The Detective at thedetective.io is a niche-research desk for founders trying to decide what to build before they spend a year on it. If you came looking for one of the other two, that's the other tab.
What we refuse to do.
- No regulated industries.
- Insurance, medical, legal advice, financial advice, tax preparation, construction lien. The compliance exposure isn't worth it for either of us. If you submit one, we refuse the run before spending and tell you why.
- No fabricated citations.
- Every claim in every analysis is anchored to a real source URL. The pipeline is built so that hallucinated citations are structurally impossible. Not asked nicely to avoid, structurally impossible.
- No silent downgrades.
- When a source is low-confidence, the report shows a low-confidence dot. When evidence is thin, the verdict says “Preliminary”, not “Go.” We never quietly lower the bar to ship a result.
- No lock-in.
- Cancel any time from your dashboard. Your delivered analyses stay accessible after cancellation. Export your data on request.
The founder.
Builds the runner pipeline + runs the public-facing surface. Sales and analysis background; the bilingual EN/ES founder-fit thesis driver.
Two-person company. Andrés is the named co-founder; the second co-founder stays internal-only by choice. Both share the strategic decisions.
We're a 2-person company. Our code is in a single repo; every analysis is the same pipeline you'd run yourself if you had the time. No team-cloud sleight-of-hand.
Common questions
Is The Detective the same as Aleph or Detective by Charm?
No. The Detective at thedetective.io is a niche-research desk for founders deciding what to build. Aleph by OCCRP is an investigative-journalism platform used by data reporters to map relationships across leaked documents — different problem, different audience. Detective by Charm is a B2B sales-intelligence tool for outbound teams chasing prospect intel — also different problem, also different audience. Three separate products with similar names; if you came looking for one of the other two, that's the other tab.
Who built The Detective?
Andrés is the public co-founder. We're a two-person company, full owners, no investors. Both founders work on the strategic decisions together; Andrés runs the public-facing surface and the runner pipeline.
Why did you build this?
We kept hitting the same problem: every niche idea took a week of manual research, half of which was wasted on hallucinated competitors and made-up market sizes from single-shot AI tools. We built the pipeline we wanted to use ourselves — adversarial, grounded, and willing to refuse a run rather than ship guesswork.
Is the code open source?
The repo is currently private. We link directly to the production code paths from the methodology page; the pipeline we describe is the pipeline that runs. Open-sourcing the runner is on the post-PMF roadmap.
How do you make money?
Paid subscriptions — Starter ($12.99 one-time), Explorer, Hunter, and Operator monthly tiers. No data sales, no advertising, no affiliate kickbacks on the niches we recommend. The full pricing matrix is on the pricing page.
Who is this for?
Solo founders and small teams evaluating multiple business niches with limited time. The Detective is built for the person who wants a grounded, adversarial second opinion before committing weeks of build time — not a list of trending keywords. If you already know what you're building, you probably don't need us.
What won't you analyze?
Regulated industries we cannot safely advise on (insurance, medical, legal advice, tax, construction lien, financial advice). The preflight gate refuses these and tells you why. We also refuse niches with so little public evidence that no honest verdict is possible.
Want to see the work?
Read about the 6-step pipeline, or skip ahead and run an analysis on your own idea.