February 2026 · written at age 42
TL;DR: I spent 15 years failing at side projects so you don't have to. I turned every lesson into The Slaughterhouse—a free AI tool that runs your startup idea through 15 brutal gates and tells you if it'll die before you waste months finding out.
Since 2009, I've been building side projects and writing about why they failed. I've built over a dozen things—classified ads sites, Reddit clones, viral experiments, web lotteries. Most of them died. I wrote a retrospective on each one, trying to extract the lesson before it faded.
After enough failures, I became that friend. "Hey, can I run something by you?" — and thirty minutes later, we'd both know if the idea was worth another weekend or already dead. Different friend groups, different Slack channels, different coffee chats—same patterns, same holes I'd crawled out of years earlier.
So I built The Slaughterhouse.
What It Does
You answer six questions about your idea. An AI with the bedside manner of Dr. House runs it through 15 gates—each one a specific failure pattern I've either lived through or watched someone else live through. Is the pain real? Can you actually reach your users? Will they pay? What happens if the platform you depend on disappears?
Each gate has three verdicts: pass, bleeder (wounded but alive), or killer (dead, game over). One killer and your idea is done. You get a Wordle-style grid you can share—or hide in shame.
Why It's Brutal on Purpose
Every other validation tool is designed to make you feel good. "Great idea! Here are some tips!" That's not validation—that's a participation trophy.
When I was building my early projects, nobody told me the truth. Including me. Everyone was encouraging. Then I'd spend years on something and watch it die exactly the way someone could have predicted on day one. The kindest thing anyone could have done was to say: "This will fail, and here's why."
That's what Slaughterhouse does. In 2 minutes, instead of 2 years.
Try It
slaughterhouse.mirat.dev — it's completely free. If your idea survives, you might be onto something. If it doesn't, I just saved you months of your life. Either way, you're welcome.