Validate Your Ideas With Thinking Tests

Here's a test worth running on your next business idea: describe it to Claude and ask it to summarize what you said.

If the summary sounds like your idea, you're in good shape. If it sounds vague, generic, or subtly off, the problem is most likely that the idea wasn't clear enough in the first place.

This is one of the most useful things AI can do for a founder-operator. The ability to reflect ideas back clearly enough that you can see what's actually there.

The Clarity Problem

Most founder-operators carry ideas in their heads that feel complete.

You've been thinking about a new offer, a new product angle, a new way of positioning what you do, and in your own mind, it makes total sense.

The moment you try to explain it to someone else, the cracks appear.

You stumble on a sentence.

You catch yourself using words that sound good but don't mean much.

You realise the person you're explaining it to isn't getting it, and you're not sure if that's because they're not the right audience or because you haven't got the idea straight yet.

That gap between what you understand internally and what you can communicate externally is where most business ideas make it or break it.

Using AI as a mirror

Claude can't tell you whether your idea will sell. It doesn't know your market, your customers, or your specific context well enough to validate anything in that sense.

But it can do something arguably more useful at an early stage: it can reframe and restructure the idea back to you in a different way, and you can use that reframe to point out the missing pieces.

When you describe an idea to Claude and ask it to play it back, you get an external representation of your thinking, or in other words: what you communicated.

And those two things are often different.

A sharp reflection means your idea is coherent. A fuzzy reflection means there are gaps you haven't consciously registered yet, assumptions you're making, terms you're using loosely, parts of the offer you haven't actually decided yet.

How to Run the Test

The process is simple:

Step one: Describe your idea to Claude as if you were explaining it to a friend who doesn't know your industry. Keep it conversational.

Step two: Ask Claude to summarize back what you described in two to three sentences. Read it carefully.

Step three: Ask Claude to identify the gaps and assumptions in what you described. What did you not explain? What is it having to assume on your behalf?

Step four: Look at what it surfaces. Not to outsource your thinking, but to see where your own thinking hasn't landed yet.

You don't need to take every gap as a problem to solve immediately. Some gaps are fine to leave open at an early stage. But you should know they're there.

What a Sharp Reflection Looks Like

A clear idea produces a summary that you'd be comfortable sharing. Claude's playback sounds like your thinking in words, captures the essence without distorting it, and leaves you feeling like something got understood.

A fuzzy idea produces a summary that's technically accurate but somehow hollow. The words are right but the thing feels thin. Or Claude emphasizes something you didn't mean to lead with. Or it asks you clarifying questions that you realize you don't have answers to.

Both outcomes are useful. The reflection gives you confidence to move forward. The fuzzy one saves you from committing to an underbaked idea.

Clarity Is a Prerequisite

You can't sell what you can't explain.

You can't build what you haven't defined.

And you can't refine what you can't see clearly.

AI doesn't shortcut the thinking. But it can accelerate the moment when your thinking moves from internal to external, from the idea that lives in your head to the version that has to hold up under scrutiny.

That moment used to happen in a conversation with a trusted advisor, mentor, or in the process of writing a business plan, or after you'd already built something and gotten feedback.

Now you can get there in thirty minutes with a Claude session, before you've committed to anything.

The idea isn't real until someone outside your head can describe it back to you accurately.

Start there.

Next: how to go from a clear idea to a testable offer — using Claude to pressure-test your positioning before anyone sees it.