Getting started

Your first analysis.

A walkthrough from the intake form to the finished report. The whole flow takes about ninety seconds of your time and roughly twenty minutes of pipeline time. Here is what to expect at each step.

Before you start

You need three things ready before you open the intake form. None of them are formal; rough answers are fine and the pipeline expects rough.

An idea or a direction. A single sentence is enough. If you have multiple, pick the one you want a verdict on first.
A sense of your time, budget, and the skills you bring. The pipeline weighs all three when it ranks niches, so approximate numbers beat blanks.
An email address you actually check. The finished report arrives there, and the magic link for sign in comes through the same address.

Step 1. Open intake

From the marketing site, click Start an analysis in the nav. If you have not created an account yet, the intake form will collect your email at the end and create one for you. If you have an account already, sign in first so the analysis lands in the right dashboard.

Authentication uses a magic link sent to your email. There is no password to set and nothing to remember. Click the link, the dashboard opens.

Step 2. Fill the form

The intake form asks eight questions. They are short on purpose because the pipeline does the heavy lifting from here. The questions cover:

What you want to build, in one or two sentences.
Your skills, including languages you can sell in.
Time available per week and how long you can run.
Budget ceiling for tooling and ads in the first ninety days.
Target monthly revenue and the timeline you would accept.
Industries or audiences you refuse to serve.
Geographies you can credibly operate in.
The one fail mode that would make you walk away.

None of these are graded. The form does no judgment and does no scoring on its own. Its job is to ship a clean profile into the pipeline so the analysis is grounded in you, not in a generic founder.

Step 3. Submit

Submit the form. Two things happen on the server side at the same moment:

Your intake answers are saved to your account. They become the input every analysis you run from now on uses. You can edit them later from your profile.
A new analysis is queued. The pipeline picks it up within a minute or two and begins work on the strongest candidate from your ranked shortlist.

The thanks page

After submit you land on a confirmation page. It shows what was received, the email address the finished report will arrive at, and a rough timer for when to expect it. You do not need to keep the page open. The report runs server side regardless of whether your browser is.

A typical run completes in twelve to twenty minutes. Bad connectivity to source domains can push that to the high twenties. If a run exceeds forty minutes, the pipeline fails loud, not silent, and you receive an email saying so along with an automatic credit toward your next run.

The email

When the analysis finishes, an email arrives from hello@thedetective.io with the subject line naming your top ranked niche. The body contains the headline verdict, the one paragraph rationale, and a deep link straight into the report. You can read the whole thing in the dashboard or skim the summary in the email.

If the email does not arrive within thirty minutes, check spam. If it is not there, sign in and open your dashboard directly; the report is there regardless. We never gate the analysis behind email delivery.

Finding the report later

Every analysis is stored on your account permanently. Open the dashboard at any time and you will see the full list, newest first. Click any one to open it. Within the report you can:

Save the top niche or any sub niche to your watchlist.
Promote a Go or Go with caveats verdict into the Project Tracker so milestones and kill conditions are carried forward.
Compare this analysis against any previous one to see where they agree, where they diverge, and which sources overlap.
Export the report. Native export to common formats is Operator only today; markdown copy is available on every tier.

If something goes wrong

Two failure modes you might hit on a first run:

Refused. The pipeline refuses any niche that touches a regulated industry on our exclusion list. You get an email explaining which rule fired and a refund of the run. Nothing is charged when a refusal happens.
Preliminary verdict. The public evidence on your top ranked niche is too thin to render a confident Go or No go. The report ships with the band labeled Preliminary, plus the ranked alternates the pipeline considered. You also receive an automatic credit toward another run.

Anything else: email hello@thedetective.io with the report id from the URL. A founder reads every one of those.