How to Validate Product Ideas Using Reddit and ChatGPT Before Building

TL;DR

While lurking on r/footballmanagergames for the last few years, I could see I was far from the only one struggling to create the right tactics to get the most out of my team in Football Manager. As time went on, I started noticing more patterns around this and other similar questions and feedback requests. From here, I decided to use ChatGPT to analyze the subreddit at scale and quantify my assumptions.

The data was clear: tactics dominated at roughly 38% of posts during the period I reviewed. The findings led me to build the tactic analyzer as my MVP, and as of writing this, Assman.ai has analyzed 1891 tactics with 4979 follow-up messages. Player development came next at around 7% of posts, with 450 players reviewed and 819 messages. While the squad review and transfer assistant had a higher question frequency, they were both too large in scope for me to build at this time.

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Starting Point

"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." - Arthur Ashe

Football Manager became an addiction when I found it in 2023. As someone who loves soccer and strategy games, it hooked me immediately. Steam says I have 1000+ hours in the series, doing playthroughs in England, the Netherlands, and Germany, where I take a low-tier team and work them through the league pyramid to get them into the top league in their country. I explain all of this to show that I already had some expertise and understanding of the ecosystem before I started this. I wouldn't name something AssMan.ai unless I had an actual reason for it.

I wanted to keep the scope limited. I was testing what I could build as a solo builder using no-code tools, so I needed to pick one feature to start with and validate it worked before moving to the next.

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Validation and Prioritization

I had my hypothesis about tactics based on my own experience and confidence from following r/footballmanagergames since I started playing, but I didn't want to make assumptions. I needed to see if there was anything else I should consider before committing, so I went back to the subreddit to find any additional supporting data.

I went back through the previous month of posts to see what people were consistently asking about. FM24 had been out for nearly two years at this point. Sports Interactive missed their usual annual release, so FM25 was never released. My thought was that if the same questions were still showing up this late in the game's lifecycle, that meant the issues weren't going away unless FM26 made massive changes.

The pattern around tactics and strategy was easily the most frequent. Post after post asking "why is my tactic not working," "why is my striker not scoring," "why is my tactic suddenly not working?" I struggled with tactics myself, and during my last playthrough, I used ChatGPT as an assistant manager to get feedback on my tactics. Seeing how often these questions came up confirmed that tactics were a significant issue, but I wanted to see if any other pain points made sense to tackle.

One common theme I kept seeing, besides tactics, was complaints about time commitment. Football Manager is called a spreadsheet simulator for a reason. During transfer periods, you can spend hours searching through databases of 100k+ players trying to find the perfect fit. Getting a new playthrough started is just as bad; you can spend multiple hours evaluating your squad, identifying weak spots, and planning changes before you even progress a single day. I'd experienced both myself too.

While less called out, player development was another recurring request. People asked how they should train a player and where they should play them to maximize their potential. It showed up less frequently than tactics or time-saving features, but it was consistent enough to consider.

Manual browsing gave me a strong signal, but I wanted numbers to back it up. Back in late July and early August, ChatGPT relied more on Reddit data, making it easier to pull extensive information from the platform. I asked it to analyze the last month of posts from r/footballmanagergames, create themes, and categorize the volume. After massaging the themes to match what I was looking for, I had it generate a table that showed the breakdown. The data was clear: tactics dominated at roughly 38% of all posts. Posts about tactics also received more engagement than posts about other topics.

The other patterns I'd noticed manually also showed up in the data. Time commitment across topics like transfers and squad management came to around 22% of posts. Player development came in at around 7%, which was lower volume than I'd hoped, but consistent enough that it felt worth exploring if tactics gained traction.

Before making my final call, I looked into the tools people already use. The most popular was ratemytactic.com, which requires users to input their tactics manually and then provides feedback based on an algorithm. There are other tools, like fmdatalab.com, that calculate player role proficiency, as well as a handful of forums.

While there are competitive tools and forums people already use, that actually makes me more confident, as it shows people will use tools and external resources for help. With that, I decided to build the tactic analyzer first, as there was an opportunity for instant, automated feedback that would enable interactive follow-up, differentiating it from the current tools.

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What Got Built

As of writing this, Assman.ai has analyzed 1891 tactics and 4979 follow-up messages from users, delving deeper into suggested improvements. The research showed that, in this case, there was a high correlation between high Reddit volume and high product usage.

One of the first things I realized was that friction kills adoption. If I wanted people actually to use this, the flow had to be dead simple. Screenshot your tactic, upload it, and get feedback. No manual entry like ratemytactic.com required. The chatbot made it even better. Users could ask follow-up questions and iterate on the feedback in real time, something Reddit threads and static tools couldn't offer.

After releasing the tactic analyzer and seeing decent traction, I started prototyping solutions for transfer assistant, squad review, and player development. I eliminated the transfer assistant quickly. The user would need to manually export a file from the game, potentially with 100k rows, and I would need to parse it and provide answers. Not impossible, but it would require custom data processing that wasn't worth the effort for an MVP. I tried squad review and had some success, but I couldn't get more complex answers like suggested tactics and formations for the team based on the squad, even when I used more expensive models. There might be an opportunity for this in the future, but with current ChatGPT AI wrapper capabilities, it didn't deliver enough value.

I built the player development feature next. It had some demand and the same upload flow: take a screenshot, get feedback. There wasn't much friction, and I could reuse a lot of what I'd already built for tactics. As of writing this, Assman.ai analyzed 450 players with 819 messages. The throughput was significantly lower than tactics, but that tracked with the research. Player development accounted for about 7% of Reddit posts, compared to tactics at 38%. Lower volume, but consistent enough to validate it was worth building.

During this time, I also built out functionality around account creation and account benefits. In total, 125 people created accounts. This number increased when I added the option to create a Gmail account, which significantly reduced friction. I also added the ability for users to see all their historical tactics and player development feedback.

As of this writing, Assman.ai has analyzed a total of 2341 images, and users have sent 5798 messages to the chatbot. I ran ads for about a month and spent around $2000. I stopped once I'd learned what I wanted to about ad campaigns and using Google Ads as a platform. Once I stopped advertising, traffic dropped to a few people a day.

For now, I'm holding off on more development around AssMan.ai. It proved I could build and validate a product solo using no-code tools, and that was the goal. I'll be adding a Patreon in the near future. If it gets enough traction, I'll return to development, but for now I'm focused on other adventures.

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Closing Thoughts

The research method worked. Manual browsing gave me direction, ChatGPT gave me confidence, and the data held up in production. Tactics led Reddit at 38% and usage with 1891 tactics reviewed. Player development represented 7% of posts and reviewed 450 players. The numbers weren't perfect, but they were directional, and that was enough.

Every subreddit has pain points that get discussed over and over. It might not be evident at first, but they're there. I found one in a space I knew well, and quantified it with actual data. That said, even if you find a pain point, you must also validate if it is worth it. Learning was my main goal for this product, so make sure your expectations match your realistic goals.

You probably have a space you know well, too. A hobby, a profession, a problem you've dealt with personally. That's your advantage. You understand the context, you can spot the patterns, and you can tell the difference between real pain and noise. This method works when you lean into that knowledge and let the data confirm what you're seeing.