New startup ideas · AI for people who run the AI themselves · Self-run automation for small-business operators
startup concept
Scrubdeck
A data-cleaning step any workflow can call, with rules the owner keeps
Scrubdeck is an MCP server and native n8n and Zapier step that deduplicates, normalizes and validates customer and order records as they flow between an operator's apps.
- Infrastructure and APIs
- Small business
- 'MCP donated to the Agentic AI Foundation'
10
similar startups, last 2 years (19 all-time)
yes
3 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$250 · 3 weeks · 25 prospects
For $250 and 3 weeks, prove that operators syncing Shopify, an email tool and QuickBooks will prepay $149 to have their records cleaned, and that one shared rule set fixes most of the mess without hand-tuning.
Riskiest assumption · An operator syncing Shopify, an email tool and QuickBooks will pay $149 this week to have duplicate and mismatched records fixed, and at least 70% of what they pay to fix is identical across businesses.
1Focus group: who and where
Owner or operations manager of a US Shopify store doing $500k-5M a year with 3-10 staff, running Shopify plus Klaviyo or Mailchimp plus QuickBooks, who in the past month found the same customer duplicated across tools or sent the same email twice to one person.
where to find 25 · r/shopify and the n8n community forum at community.n8n.io, where operators post about sync and duplicate problems by name; the Store Leads directory, filtered to US Shopify stores running both a Klaviyo or Mailchimp integration and QuickBooks; the Shopify Entrepreneurs Facebook group, where owners ask for dedupe app recommendations weekly.
2Sell first, build later
A one-time cross-tool cleanup: export contacts and orders from Shopify, Klaviyo or Mailchimp, and QuickBooks; receive a merge report of every duplicate and mismatch plus clean import files within 5 business days of sending the exports.
the ask · $149 flat up to 25,000 records, then $6 per additional 1,000 records; the future inline step at $0.75 per 1,000 records processed, $49 per month minimum
a real yes · A real yes is $149 charged before the exports arrive, or the $100 founding credit paid; compliments, requests for a free sample run, and 'we would use this once it is a Zapier step' are not
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Prepaid cleanup on real data
$150 · 10 days
Pitch a one-time cleanup, no product: the operator exports contacts from Shopify, their email tool and QuickBooks, the founder returns a merge report and clean import files in 5 business days, done by hand with spreadsheets and scripts. Reach 25 operators through the three sources, book 15 calls, ask for the $149 prepayment on the call. The Store Leads month funds the list pull.
keep going if · 5 of 15 calls end with $149 charged before any export is received
2. Shared-rules generalization check
$0 · 7 days
Clean the first 5 paying customers' datasets using one shared rule set, adding a logged custom rule only when the shared set fails. Tag every correction as shared-rule or custom-rule and compute the shared share per dataset. This directly tests the card's stated risk that rules do not generalize.
keep going if · At least 70% of all corrections across the 5 datasets come from the shared rule set
3. Founding inline-step reservation
$100 · 7 days
After delivering each merge report, offer the ongoing product before it exists: an inline n8n or Zapier cleaning step at $0.75 per 1,000 records with a $49 monthly minimum, founding rate locked 12 months, reserved by prepaying a $100 usage credit through a simple checkout page. The report in their hands is the demo.
keep going if · 3 of 5 cleanup customers prepay the $100 usage credit
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$100
per prospect, refundable
how · A prepaid usage credit taken through a checkout page after the paid cleanup proves the output; a usage credit fits a usage-priced product better than a subscription hold, and the owner authorizes it directly, no signature chain needed set up: Stripe Checkout ↗
what it reserves · One of 10 founding-cohort slots, the $0.75 per 1,000 records rate locked for 12 months, and their exact tool pair built as the first native step
refund · Fully refundable on request any time before the inline step is live in their workflow.
target · 5 prepaid cleanups from 25 prospects in 21 days, then 3 of 5 cleanup customers buying the $100 credit within 30 days
before taking money · If a prospect is a medical or dental clinic, do not accept patient records without a signed BAA; run this test on e-commerce contact data only.
Go: build it if
5 of 15 calls prepay the $149 cleanup, the shared rule set covers at least 70% of corrections across the first 5 datasets, and 3 of 5 buy the $100 founding credit; build the n8n step.
Kill: stop if
Fewer than 2 prepayments from 15 calls, or shared rules cover under 50% of corrections in every dataset, or 0 founding credits after 5 delivered reports; stop.
5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open
outreach message
Saw your post about duplicate contacts between Shopify and Klaviyo. I clean exactly this: you export contacts from Shopify, Klaviyo and QuickBooks, I send back a merge report and clean import files in 5 business days, $149 flat up to 25,000 records. I am doing 10 of these by hand to build the cleaning rules into an n8n step. Up for a 20-minute call this week to see if your setup fits?
landing page
Your customer list, deduped across Shopify, email and QuickBooks $149 flat up to 25,000 records: a merge report plus clean import files in 5 business days Book a 20-minute fit call and prepay to start
deposit terms
Your $100 founding credit reserves one of 10 spots in the first cohort of the inline cleaning step and locks your rate at $0.75 per 1,000 records for 12 months, applied against your first usage. Fully refundable any time before the step is live in your workflow. Target live date: within 60 days of your deposit.
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
Ranked against every idea in the catalog: trend, demand and 100x potential from the corpus, competition relative to the other ideas. A generated concept has no judges or swipes yet, so its pillars use the data signals only.
64
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 39.8 x 1.61
Crowded
competition: more crowded than 78% of ideas · headwind x0.61
+2.1
government priorities, secondary (3 matching grants)
Trend
49
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)98
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector0
- Sector direction (live batch)50
Demand
65
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100
100x potential
73
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Neighbours still alive73
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 382 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were data-cleaning, step, workflow, call, rules, owner, mcp, server.
The concept in full
- What
- Scrubdeck is an MCP server and native n8n and Zapier step that deduplicates, normalizes and validates customer and order records as they flow between an operator's apps. Every correction the owner confirms becomes a versioned rule they own, so the cleaning gets stricter over time instead of resetting per prompt. Sold by usage to small businesses drowning in mismatched records across five tools.
- Grounded in (2025-2026 signals)
- On December 9, 2025 MCP was donated to the Agentic AI Foundation with 97 million monthly SDK downloads and 10,000 active servers, with first-class support in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot and VS Code; Hanji (yc X25) turns 'your hardest documents into reliable data', showing data quality sells standalone.
- What it rides
- 'MCP donated to the Agentic AI Foundation', by shipping data hygiene as one plug any operator's assistant or workflow can take
- Why now
- With 10,000 active MCP servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads as of December 2025, an installable data-hygiene step reaches every major assistant and workflow tool through one protocol, distribution that did not exist a year ago; MIT's August 2025 report ties failed AI projects to exactly this kind of missing groundwork.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- First customer is an e-commerce or clinic operator syncing contacts between a CRM, an email tool and QuickBooks. In the first hour alone they install the n8n node or MCP server, run their contact list through it, and review a merge report of duplicates found. Priced per thousand records.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- Hanji extracts data from hard documents as a batch job; Clidey unifies scattered data into an analytics platform. Scrubdeck is an inline cleaning step inside the workflows the owner already runs, with owner-versioned rules neither offers.
- Main risk
- Cleaning rules generalize poorly across businesses, so every new customer needs hand-tuning a two-person team cannot afford.
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Public money in this direction
US federal grants and open opportunities matched to the concept's terms.
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K
NIH / NHGRI · STTR phase I · $395K
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