Validate business ideas with a looping agent before writing any code

The poster, who has shipped five products of their own, set up Claude Code on a fresh VPS with a single goal: make money. A loop wakes the agent every 30 minutes, and its CLAUDE.md holds the lessons from those five products, chief among them to find and validate an idea before building anything. The agent picked the ideas itself, in industries the poster says they know nothing about, and checked each against the poster's criteria. It was given a domain and its own Zoho email account for cold outreach, and it bought lead data from a provider the poster calls Treg. It also wrote its own kill rule for the surviving idea: under 3 replies to 40 cold emails and no takers for a free offer by November 23 means the idea is dead.

Of 12 ideas it checked, it killed 11 before writing code. One lost to an existing $99 a month tool; another because the platform's terms require a human user. The last one is in validation. Early scraping went too fast and hit captchas, so the poster added a 24 hour block per site, and some sites blocked the home IP. It found 43 leads for $0.80 in data credits and has made $0. The post covers about one weekend.

The agent caps itself at 5 cold emails a day, and each one says it comes from an AI agent and carries an opt-out line. A commenter running a similar loop warned that a written deadline only holds if a separate scheduled job checks it on the day, and that a loop can look alive while its jobs have quietly stopped. Another commenter who ran one for three months reports nothing has worked yet.