Roadmap: built in public

1mil.app is one founder building an AI tool that finds and pressure-tests business ideas. Here is how it got here, what we learned, and what we are building next. If you want to shape it, the form at the bottom goes straight to us.

Why we publish this

Most tools hide how they are made. We do the opposite, for one reason: the product is about telling you the truth about an idea, including the hard parts. A roadmap that only lists wins would contradict that. So this page includes the things we tried and dropped, and the moment we found a real gap in our own scoring and fixed it.

The story so far

• March 2026

  Formed the company

  Registered Million Opportunities LLC in Wyoming and set up the foundation, so this could be a real product rather than a weekend script.

• April 2026

  Built the scanner and shipped the workspace

  The core pipeline: research a topic with live web grounding, generate candidate opportunities, then score them. Paired with a redesigned landing page and workspace.

• May 2026

  Made it findable, and made it tougher

  Built out the content surfaces (ideas by role, validation guides, comparisons), fixed dozens of technical SEO issues, and unified the brand. When a model we relied on was retired without warning, we hardened the pipeline against the next outage.

• June 2026

  Accounts, billing, and lifecycle email

  Added Stripe billing, Clerk accounts with an optional sign-in step (kept behind an instant kill-switch so it can be reversed in seconds), funnel analytics, and a consent-first email system on Resend.

• June 2026

  Tried a billing rail, then dropped it

  We explored Whop as a distribution and billing channel and shelved it. It was a payment rail, not a discovery feature, and it pulled focus from the core job. Not everything we start ships.

• June 2026

  Added a Winnability rating

  A second rating beside the demand score: whether a solo builder can actually capture an idea, not just whether people pay for it. More detail below.

• June 2026

  Fixed competitor research that was too optimistic

  Our scans were calling markets "open" when they were not. We found ideas reported as having little competition that actually had a dozen or more funded tools already serving them. We rewrote how the scanner checks competition: it now searches for the real alternatives, including platform-native features and do-it-yourself workarounds, names them, and states the gap against those named players instead of claiming an empty market.

• July 2026 (latest)

  Stopped the scanner from defaulting to "build an AI tool"

  The scanner began as an AI-opportunity finder, so its research step was built to look for "AI tools, software, and SaaS" for every topic. That fit when the whole product was about AI. But broader topics, like a snack recipe or a local product, kept returning AI apps that did not belong. So we broadened the research to look for whatever actually serves a topic, including physical products, local services, and offline businesses. On genuinely AI topics it still surfaces AI tools, because that is what fits. The topic decides now, not an old default.

A closer look: the Winnability rating

We ran our own top-rated ideas through a hard willingness-to-pay check, the kind a skeptical investor would. The result was uncomfortable: most of them had real, provable demand and were still bad bets for a solo builder, because a free tier, a funded incumbent, or the platform vendor had already closed the gap.

That exposed a gap in our own scoring. Our score measured demand (do people pay for this?) but was blind to winnability (can you, without an audience, actually capture it?). Those are different questions, and we were only answering one.

So we added a second rating beside the demand score. For each top idea it now checks four things: whether anyone already pays, whether a free or native option sets the price floor, whether a funded player or the platform already shipped it, and whether the moat is something code can build. It shows the single biggest reason an idea is hard, in plain language. The idea generation did not change. We only added the honest second number.

What is next

• Extend the winnability check beyond the top ideas to the full set.
• Publish validated idea breakdowns: the ideas that survive scrutiny, and the tempting traps that do not.
• Keep tuning the scoring against real outcomes, not intuition.

What we build next depends partly on you.

Tell us what to build

Have an idea, a complaint, or a feature you want? It goes straight to the founder. Email is optional, only add it if you want a reply.