Riskiest x Novus.ai

Inspiration

It started with a graveyard of dead features !?!!?!? Watched brilliant teams spend six months and burning $$$ building products nobody wanted. It's the silent killer of startups. The problem isn't that we build too slowly-- it's that we build the wrong things. I wanted to create a tool that forces you to face the brutal reality of your assumptions before you even open your code editor.

What it does

Riskiest is a reality check. Pitch a feature, and our engine ruthlessly extracts the single behavior that will kill your idea if you are wrong. But it doesn't stop at advice. It automatically generates a step-by-step prototype path to test that exact assumption, and uses the Novus API to plot real-world hesitation metrics on a live dashboard. It scientifically proves whether you should build something-or kill it.

How we built it

We wanted this to feel like a premium, heavy-hitting enterprise tool. We laid the foundation with the Next.js 16 App Router. We wired up Supabase for edge-ready auth and state. Then, we brought in Gemini 2.5 Flash as the brain, and the Novus API (Pendo) to handle the live analytics telemetry.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest fight was wrestling the AI. Gemini wanted to act like a polite, friendly consultant offering paragraphs of generic advice. We spent days engineering the prompts to make it ruthless, forcing it to spit out raw, testable data points instead of fluff.

On the architecture side, Next.js 16’s strict static prerendering completely clashed with our dynamic Supabase edge authentication. It broke our builds repeatedly, forcing a massive, ground-up rewrite of our middleware logic just hours before the deadline.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We ain't a wrapper. We built a true, closed-loop system. Going from a vague idea to a prototype path, and finally to hard data on a dashboard-all in one fluid motion-was a massive technical win. It feels like a fully-shipped $$/mo product.

What we learned

Building the test is easy. Identifying the right thing to test is brutally hard. Translating abstract Product Management frameworks into strict, programmable AI prompts fundamentally changed how we approach product strategy.

This is just the beginning ;)

Built With

• google-gemini
• nextjs
• novus-api
• pendo
• typescript
• vercel