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Side Project2026

Clien.ai

Stress-test your startup ideas before you build them

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Side Project
AI Agent
Deep Research & Validation

Every time I've started something new, I've wished I could talk to my target customers before writing a single line of code. Customer discovery is one of the most important things a founder can do, and most people skip it because it's slow and awkward. I wanted to see if AI could make it faster without losing the rigour.

You describe your business idea, and Clien.ai kicks off a deep research agent that does the whole validation process for you. It decomposes your idea into testable hypotheses, generates realistic personas, and then runs the research.

Clien.ai screenshot

The Agent

The agent runs six sub-agents in parallel: four synthetic interviewers (one per persona), a web researcher analysing competitors and market data, and a forum researcher mining Reddit, Hacker News, and ProductHunt for real demand signals. Each interviewer follows a structured protocol designed to counter the positivity bias that plagues synthetic research. They don't just agree with you. They push back on your pricing, your differentiation, your go-to-market. Then a synthesiser agent triangulates findings across all three research methods and produces a validation report with confidence scores. The whole thing runs for 20-30 minutes on an E2B sandbox and costs $2-3. Traditional user research would take weeks and cost thousands.

Where This Stands

This is a side project I keep coming back to. It's not launched yet. But I've been using the agent to validate Clien.ai itself and to test business ideas for friends. It found competitors I hadn't come across after months of working on this, and the synthetic interviews validated my approach of building a self-serve product for early-stage founders and indie hackers rather than going enterprise. That's the kind of output that makes me think this approach has legs.

Concept
Deep research agent · Synthetic interviews · Competitive analysis · Forum mining
Status
Side project · Not yet launched
Tech Stack
Claude Agent SDK · TypeScript · E2B Sandbox · Supabase

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