What’s a Design Partner vs. the waitlist?+
Design Partners get hands-on access during the beta: direct 1:1 time with the Pathfinder Foundry team, early platform access, and influence over the methodology. Waitlist signups stay in the loop for the eventual public launch. It’s the same form: drop your email and your stage and stop, or continue into the seven-question diagnostic to be considered for the current design-partner beta.
Why is ProtoVibing different from Lovable / Bolt / v0 / Cursor?+
Those tools optimize for output. ProtoVibing optimizes for the validity of the bet you’re betting on. We force a falsifiable hypothesis, a named customer, and a written go/no-go decision rule before the first prompt. The prototype gets built only to test something specific, never as the goal itself.
Do I need to be technical?+
No. The Create phase produces a frontend-only prototype using AI tools you already use; people who can already code move faster, but the methodology doesn’t require coding skill. Validation rigor is what compounds, not raw build velocity.
Does this work inside a company, or is it only for startups?+
It works in both, and the loop is identical. What changes is who witnesses it. A founder brings co-founders and advisors; a product team brings its design partner, its engineering lead, and whoever signs off on the roadmap. The decision rule does the same job in either place: it gets written before the interviews so the result can’t be re-argued afterward. Teams inside companies usually have easier access to customers and a harder time getting permission to kill an idea. The written go/no-go is what makes that second conversation short.
What does the methodology assume I have already?+
An idea you can articulate in a sentence and a few hours a week to commit. That’s the floor. If you don’t have an idea yet, the Idea phase is built to help you sharpen one, but we’re not in the business of generating ideas for people who don’t have them.
How long does one loop take?+
A loop moves as fast as you have time to move through it. With AI-assisted tools accelerating every phase except one, a committed team can compress Idea through Create into days. The bottleneck is almost always the Test phase: scheduling and completing real customer interviews takes as long as it takes. That is not a flaw in the methodology. It is the point. The fastest possible loop is one where the interviews are done, not skipped.
What do I actually walk away with when a loop closes?+
A GitHub repo you own. Every document you confirmed during the loop is synced there: the combined dossier at the root, the product, spec, market, and build sections as individual files, and one folder per loop holding that loop's synthesis. Each closed loop arrives as its own pull request, so your validation history reads back as commit history. Today the repo carries validation documents rather than runnable code, which is the point. It is the foundation the real build answers to.
Does the repo work with Claude Code and Cursor?+
Yes, and this is the part most people don't expect. Agentic build tools look for a root AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md to ground themselves before they start writing. ProtoVibing writes both, containing what the industry is starting to call a project constitution: the decisions and requirements that were actually tested with customers. Point Claude Code at the repo and it reads your validated learning first, then builds against it, instead of reintroducing the assumptions your loops were designed to kill.
What happens to my data and my interviews?+
Your project, transcripts, and artifacts stay private to you and the people you explicitly invite. We don’t train models on your work. Service-role access is reserved for product operations only.
When does it open beyond design partners?+
After our early design partners close a full validation loop and we’re confident the experience holds up. Everyone on the list gets notified, in order of join date.