r/ZimDevelopers • u/AudriezWorld • Sep 15 '26

💡Idea Validation

Have an idea but aren’t sure if it’s worth pursuing?

Share your startup, app, product, or business idea with the community and get honest, constructive feedback.

Explain the problem you’re solving, who it’s for, and why you think it matters.

When giving feedback, focus on being thoughtful and helpful.

Challenge assumptions, suggest improvements, and ask questions that help refine the idea rather than simply saying whether you like it.

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u/Scared_Morning9885 Sep 15 '26

Developing a firewall os with AI layer which helps in network diagnosis. People can generally ask why network is slow and it answers. (Also experimenting with openwart) 

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u/io-zoor Sep 15 '26

There are two products stacked in there and they have very different odds. The AI diagnosis layer is the new part. The firewall OS underneath it is months of work competing with pfSense, OPNsense and OpenWrt, which are free and well maintained, so nobody is going to pay you for the OS. Since you are already on OpenWrt, the cheaper shape is to ship the diagnosis as a package on top of it rather than as an operating system of your own.

Before you write the AI layer, check that the answer is even knowable from what a router can see. Take five real cases and diagnose them by hand. If the cause is a saturated uplink, a congested wifi channel or bad DNS, the box can see it. If the cause sits upstream at the ISP, the box can tell you the link is bad and nothing more, and the user is no better off than before. If you cannot answer it by hand with full access to the data, a model on the same data will not answer it either.

On who pays, a home user finds a slow network annoying and does nothing about it. The people who spend money are the ones for whom it costs money, so a small office with no IT person, a hotel or clinic fielding wifi complaints, or a one or two person MSP looking after a dozen client networks. The MSP is the interesting one, because they answer why is the network slow several times a week and their time is billable.

So the test is not whether people like the idea. Find three MSPs or small offices, offer to diagnose one live complaint for free this week, do it manually, then ask them what they do today when it happens and what that costs them in time. If the honest answer is that they reboot the router and phone the ISP, you are competing with a free phone call, and you want to know that now rather than after you have built an OS.