ROADMAP.md — Unified Roadmap Synthesis

Date: 2026-07-11 · produced by brief 28 · Roadmap Synthesis (re-run), read-only over every audit report at the repo root and in reports/. Second run — a prior ROADMAP.md (2026-07-09) synthesized the product-improvement reports; this run leads with what changed, then folds the seven Founder Funnel venture reports + the PIVOT verdict on top.

How to read this. Every item traces to a source report; nothing new is smuggled in. Tags: test — a $0 validation gate (the pivot's pre-tests) · ship — buildable in this repo now · ext — needs maintainer accounts/decisions (cannot be built here) · gated — deliberately blocked on a signal, data, or decision · done — shipped. Impact/effort are recalibrated on the pivot's scale: "impact" now means moves the validation question or protects the moat/trust, not storefront optimization.

---

What changed since 2026-07-09

The last roadmap was a product-optimization plan: see the funnel, close the silent stalls, patch honesty drift, then spend the visibility. Its ~50 ship items were built (0.14.0, PR #27), and 0.15.0/0.16.0 added the ledger redesign, the design engine, BLINDSPOTS, and the breadcrumb pass. Three things then changed the frame underneath it:

• **A full Founder Funnel ran (NICHE · DEMAND · COMPETITORS · MARKET · POSITIONING · MOAT ·

VERDICT) and returned a verdict: PIVOT — axis: product. Not a kill (pain is real, recurring, sufferer-verbatim; the first ten are nameable; timing is genuinely 2026), and not "keep optimizing the storefront." Two bars hard-failed: competitive survivability (the "own-the-loop" wedge has no moat against an Anthropic that can copy it trivially and profitably — MOAT: "no moat today, only head starts") and economics (at the sourced 1–3% dev-tool conversion floor the dollar thesis collapses ~20× into $9k–58k side income — MOAT napkin). Both fails share one root: the money and the only path to a moat live in the outcome/loop (report→Studio→47·Fixer→FIXLOG), not in the $0 forkable catalog text. The ruling: keep the customer and the pain, move the paid surface to the loop, and validate willingness-to-pay CHEAPLY before building anything more.**

• BLINDSPOTS.md (2026-07-10, meta-audit) independently reached the same conclusion the

old roadmap didn't digest: "a beautifully machined answer to the wrong layer… verifying the verifiable proxy instead of the value." It ruled the old plan's own tell — 50 storefront items shipped while the three audience-creating items (measurement, npm, launch) stayed open and the R62 pivot decision stayed deferred. That decision is now taken (VERDICT = pivot). BLINDSPOTS also contributes a fresh backlog the old roadmap never saw.

• Four pivot changes shipped to main (commits 54ae65f, ae724d5) — marked done

below, not re-listed as todo: (a) re-badged the register to audit/brief/evidence; (b) made the report→Fixer→FIXLOG loop legible in the Proof section; (c) locked the /teams WTP surface (competitor $24–48 anchor, $0 DIY floor, "on request", one intent CTA); (d) surfaced the machine-enforced quality-bar claim, linking /quality. All four are TDD-locked in tests/test_build.py.

Net effect on the roadmap. The product backlog is substantially built. The frontier is no longer construction — it is validation. The old Themes A–H (funnel, handoff, trust, SEO, retention, forms, differentiation, revenue rails) are ~90% shipped and roll up into "Already done." What re-organizes everything now is one thesis:

Own the audit loop — and prove the hope for ~$0 before building against it. The evidence says the catalog-as-company fails on moat and conversion; the operator's hope (that free attention converts, that the loop accretes switching cost, that the flag gets planted before Anthropic bothers) is plausible but unproven. The whole "Now" is the six cheap pre-tests that test that hope — and the one measurement that reads them.

The single biggest re-prioritization: the old roadmap filed raw-fetch counting (R05) as a low-drama "flag to the maintainer." Post-pivot it is the measurement spine — every validation gate returns an unreadable signal without it (BLINDSPOTS F1: "optimizing a ratio whose numerator is invisible").

---

1 · Sources

Read this run — the seven venture reports (fresh effort): NICHE (61) · DEMAND (62) · COMPETITORS (63) · MARKET (64) · POSITIONING (65) · MOAT (66) · VERDICT (67). Read this run — reports the old roadmap predates: BLINDSPOTS (meta-audit, 2026-07-10) · BREADCRUMBS (145). Carried forward from the 2026-07-09 synthesis (their product items already digested there, statuses updated below): FUNNEL · COMPETITIVE · REVENUE · AI-IDEAS · SEO · CRO · RETENTION · PROOF · ACTIVATION · FORMS · CHECKOUT (null) · BUGS · SECURITY-AUDIT · IMPROVEMENTS · DX · CREDIBILITY · COMPREHENSION · BRAND · HIERARCHY · COLOR · LAYOUT · TYPOGRAPHY · STATES · SHOWCASE · FIXLOG. Total on hand: 34 audit reports (27 product + 7 venture) + this ROADMAP. reports/ is the write target and it exists — writing here.

Missing — and which absence would most change this roadmap:

• **The WTP / launch signal is the missing evidence that would most change the roadmap — and

it is not an in-repo audit. VERDICT, MARKET §4 and NICHE §4 all rule that the one number that decides the thesis (does free attention convert to a paid dollar; does a genuine launch clear a few hundred stars) is knowable only from real customer conversations + a real launch. No further desk audit substitutes. Run the pre-tests (§4 Now), not another brief.**

• An EVALS / brief-efficacy report — the highest-value absent in-repo audit. BLINDSPOTS

F4/§8.4: the linter verifies shape (4-phase, ask-first, 4k cap), never substance — "a hollow brief that pattern-matches passes clean." The pivot just made the quality-bar claim prominent (shipped item d); nothing proves it. Seeded-defect fixtures + expected-findings assertions would convert the claim from shape to truth. No brief for this exists yet.

• A11Y.md (brief 86) — still absent; FORMS FV3 (every error unannounced to screen readers)

+ BLINDSPOTS §5.5 (zero a11y verification while selling brief 86) make it the top product-hygiene gap. It won't change the strategic sequence, so it sits in Later.

• PERF.md — SEO-2's 572 KB homepage + BLINDSPOTS #6 (catalog ships twice, 228 KB;

bodies.json 420 KB precached) would size the payoff of the body-stripping work. Later.

• OPPORTUNITIES.md (Founder Funnel stage 60) — absent by design; the funnel starts at 61

and the venture is fixed. VERDICT confirms the ruling survives its absence completely.

---

2 · Unified backlog (deduped)

Grouped by the pivot's logic. sources cite the reports each item traces to; nothing here is new. The ~50 shipped product items + the 4 pivot changes are rolled into Already done at the end rather than re-listed.

A — Validation gates (the pivot's $0 pre-tests) — the whole reason to re-run

B — Measurement & external unlocks (carried open; they enable the gates)

C — Launch-blockers (BLINDSPOTS P0s the pivot pulls INTO Now — you can't Show HN into these)

D — Claim-defense & product-truth (BLINDSPOTS, re-weighted by the pivot)

E — Revenue (built; deliberately HELD until G1 returns a positive signal)

F — Carried Later (data- / decision- / moat-gated)

Already done (rolled up — so nothing looks lost)

Shipped in 0.14.0 (PR #27): the entire old Themes A–H product backlog — R01–R52, R54–R56, R63–R66 (funnel instrumentation, handoff/copy-hint fixes, honesty-drift batch, SEO quick-wins + static catalog, Weekly-Vitals loop, forms integrity, skills-tree/Brief-Forge/differentiation bets, revenue rails incl. /teams + /partners pages). Shipped 0.15.0/0.16.0: ledger redesign, design engine, breadcrumb cross-links, dogfood reports to reports/. Shipped in the pivot (54ae65f/ae724d5): register re-badge (POSITIONING/COMPETITORS/NICHE) · loop legible in Proof (VERDICT act.3 / old R50) · /teams WTP surface locked (VERDICT act.1 / old R52+R55) · quality-bar claim surfaced (COMPETITORS wedge 2 / old R50). Decision taken: R62 (proceed/pivot/drop) — VERDICT ruled PIVOT — axis: product. Closed earlier: BUGS 1–5, SECURITY 1–4, COMPREHENSION, LAYOUT, TYPOGRAPHY, STATES, HIERARCHY, COLOR, BRAND, SHOWCASE F2–7, DX, IMPROVEMENTS (except publish = M2). CHECKOUT: null by design.

---

3 · Themes — root causes worth one structural fix

• The whole product was built to verify the proxy, not the value (BLINDSPOTS' one-line

verdict, and VERDICT's independently). Lint the skeleton not the efficacy; guard the conductor text not the search semantics; optimize the funnel not the traffic; mark the finding fixed without wiring the fix. One structural fix, not five patches: stop building storefront and measure the value — G1+G2+M1 turn "installs → confirmed run → inbound WTP" into observable numbers. Everything tagged gated is downstream of this.

• The money and the only moat-path both sit one layer over, in the loop — not the catalog.

DEMAND ("WTP is High for execution, ~Zero for the catalog"), MARKET (catalog TAM = $0), MOAT (no data moat by design; the loop is the only candidate with a compounding mechanism), COMPETITORS (post-run loop is "the one gap open because hard") all name the same seam. One fix: make the loop the product — G3 proves it on a real repo, T6 makes the diff-history the retention spine, and the catalog demotes to a top-of-funnel attention asset.

• **Distribution is the gate and the clock — 0★ is invisible, and the window closes when

Anthropic decides to own "audits." NICHE §3 (the star economy is border control), MARKET §3 (first-mover matters only for the noun + loop, only if the flag is planted loudly first), MOAT kill#1 (negative strategy tax; "not a moat, a countdown"). One fix:** the loud launch (G2) is not marketing polish — it is the existential first test and the only defense the survivability fail leaves (speed).

• The quality-bar claim is now load-bearing but unproven. The pivot surfaced

"machine-enforced quality bar" as a headline differentiator (shipped) precisely because POSITIONING/COMPETITORS/NICHE agree it's the one counter-belief no rival can copy — while BLINDSPOTS F4 shows the linter checks shape, not substance. One fix: T1 (efficacy evals published on /quality) makes the claim true, or the pivot's own differentiation is vibes.

• Honesty drift is now a moat threat, not cosmetics. The pivot bets everything on

"evidence, not vibes"; T3's orphans (no SECURITY.md, unversioned copied prompts, the gp-aid vs "no tracking" gap, no consumer-side report-judgment guidance) each quietly contradict it. Cheap to fix, expensive to be caught on at launch.

---

4 · Sequence & milestones

Conflicts, ruled

• THE hinge: venture "test WTP before building revenue" vs product "build the rails now."

REVENUE.md sequenced monetization as plumbing built now, sold later and proposed the /partners rate-card + backer nudge as next steps. MOAT/MARKET/VERDICT overrule that: at the sourced 1–3% dev-tool conversion floor (MOAT corrected MARKET's optimistic 5–20% against a benchmark — and won the argument, because the number is sourced, more conservative, and structurally right: converting free→paid with no wall is strictly harder than the walled comparable). Ruled with MOAT/VERDICT: the rails are already built; more revenue plumbing is wasted motion until one team says "I'd pay." The next revenue action is a $0 WTP test (G1), not a rate card. X1/X2 are gated on G1's signal. The evidence favors the pessimist here, and the pivot's discipline forbids letting optimism launder the napkin.

• **BLINDSPOTS "demote /teams+/partners to a contact line" vs VERDICT "keep /teams as the WTP

test surface." Reconciled: keep the minimal, now-locked /teams surface (it is the cheap test the pivot needs — price anchor + one intent CTA already shipped); hold** any further /partners build (X2). Minimal surface as instrument, no further plumbing.

• Old roadmap's Theme H "revenue rails = inventory to accumulate" is downgraded. It wasn't

wrong in 0.14.0 (rails are cheap); the pivot re-weights it: inventory with a structurally-null conversion step is not an asset until the step is proven non-zero.

• R05 (raw-fetch counting): old "low-drama external" → now the measurement spine. Re-ruled

up (M1, H-impact) because every validation gate is unreadable without it (BLINDSPOTS F1).

• Carried from 2026-07-09 (still valid): homepage weight — SEO-1 static cards shipped;

SEO-2 body-stripping stays sequenced behind, now folded into a PERF pass (T7/Later).

Now (1–2 weeks) — prove the hope for ~$0, and don't launch into a broken funnel

The pivot's entire near-term: run the six cheap pre-tests, turn on the one measurement that reads them, give the launch an install path, and fix the two P0s a Show HN would expose. Nothing here builds new product surface; it tests the surface that exists.

Test (gates): G1 · G2 · G4 · G5 · G6 · (G3 kick-off). Enable — flag to maintainer immediately (they gate the gates): M1 (raw-fetch counting) · M2 (npm publish) · M3 (FUNDING.yml). Ship (launch-blockers): U1 (mobile nav) · U2 (styled report pages). Why this order: the launch (G2) is the gate everything upstream feeds and the only defense speed buys — but it is worthless if the numerator is invisible (M1), has no install path (M2), or drives mobile traffic into a dead end and the proof into a text dump (U1/U2). WTP (G1) is measured from the attention G2 creates, so they run together, not in series.

Next (a month) — react to the signal; make the two claims the pivot leaned on TRUE

Branch on what Now returned. If WTP/distribution fire: stand up the SKU-A delivery motion (X1) and pay down what a scaling launch would strain. Either way: defend the differentiation the pivot made prominent.

Ship: T1 (efficacy evals — make the quality bar true) · T2 (full-text search) · T3 (trust orphans — defend "evidence not vibes") · T4 (architecture paydown) · G3 (finish the external-repo loop proof) · M4 (R60 residuals). Gated: X1 (SKU-A engagement) — only if G1 returned real intent. Why this order: Now proved (or killed) the thesis; Next spends the proof — T1/T3 close the gap between the claims the pivot shipped and the substance behind them, before a bigger audience arrives to check.

Later — moat-, data-, and decision-gated

Ship: T5 (prune — Subtract on itself) · T6 (diff-loop retention spine, after G3) · T7 (coverage-gap briefs + A11Y + PERF) · T8 (promote brief shapes) · L3 (breadcrumb residue). Gated: X2 (/partners + backer nudge, after WTP) · L1 (search aliases, after search_zero data) · L2 (screen recording). Why last: every item here is deliberately blocked on a positive WTP signal, accumulated data, a maintainer decision, or the loop being proven first — starting earlier means building against numbers that don't exist yet, exactly the failure mode BLINDSPOTS diagnosed.

---

5 · Merge log (deduplications — nothing lost)

• The pivot decision ← DEMAND's proceed/pivot/drop question (old R62) + all six funnel

reports → VERDICT: PIVOT — axis: product. R62 is closed, not open.

• WTP validation ← VERDICT act.1 + MOAT kill#2 + DEMAND "ten people" + REVENUE §3.2/§4 +

MARKET §4 → G1; the /teams surface it tests is done (pivot item c / old R52+R55).

• Distribution swing ← VERDICT act.2 + MOAT kill#3 + NICHE §3 + COMPETITORS traction +

old R60 launch half → G2 (G2 subsumes R60's "Show HN to earn first stars"; R60's Discussions concern is resolved — CTA repointed to Issues; residuals → M4).

• Own the loop ← VERDICT act.3 + COMPETITORS wedge 1 + POSITIONING Option A + old R50

(loop-legibility half, now done) → the legibility shipped; the external-repo proof is G3; the retention-spine half is T6.

• Revenue model ← REVENUE.md's five tiers merged with MOAT §1 / MARKET Phase 1:

strongest framing kept is MOAT's (flat team-audit services-first = SKU A; sponsorship audience-gated = SKU B; reject per-seat/usage/transaction/marketplace). The evidence favors MOAT's sourced 1–3% conversion ceiling over REVENUE's un-benchmarked optimism, so both SKUs are gated (X1/X2), not scheduled.

• Quality bar ← POSITIONING C + COMPETITORS wedge 2 + NICHE exploit 3 (the claim, now

done/surfaced) + BLINDSPOTS F4 (the proof, still open) → T1 makes the shipped claim true.

• Measurement ← old R05 + FUNNEL §4.3 + REVENUE §4.4 + BLINDSPOTS §1.3/F1 → M1,

re-ruled from footnote to spine.

• Analytics/trust honesty ← PROOF NF2 + RETENTION R12 (gp-aid disclosure) + BLINDSPOTS

§5.4 (gp-aid privacy) + §5.1 (no SECURITY.md) + §5.2 (unversioned prompts) → T3.

• Proof placement ← old R25/R27 (done — hero pointer, examples section) +

BLINDSPOTS §4 P0-2 (the reports render as a text dump) → the new, open half is U2.

• Old Themes A–G product backlog (R01–R52, R54–R56, R63–R66) → rolled into Already done

(0.14.0), not re-listed.

• BREADCRUMBS ← brief 145 residue; the four headline fixes were **largely applied in

0.16.0 (CLAUDE.md now classifies vitals/examples/manifest/metrics); the small remainder → L3**.

• CHECKOUT.md merged as a null (no payment surface by design); its only successors are the

gated revenue SKUs (X1/X2).

---

Report only — synthesis, no code changed. Should we adjust the sequence — e.g. is the launch swing (G2) too early before the P0 fixes (U1/U2) land, should brief-efficacy evals (T1) move into Now to defend the quality-bar claim the moment it went live, or should any revenue item be un-gated?