Open Source · Launch Checklist for Solo Builders
make-me-unicorn
AI made the prototype cheap. Everything that comes after — money, security, trust, distribution — is still on the builder. MMU is the checklist.
v0.6 · 6 progressive gates · ~550 checks · public · MIT · 2026–
What it is & why
Solo builders can now reach a working prototype in a weekend. The path from prototype to a real product, though, has not gotten shorter — pricing, refunds, auth, monitoring, OG images, sitemap, backups, incident comms. AI-generated code ships fast and breaks in ways traditional linters were never built to catch: wrong assumptions about users, money, security, trust.
init · validate (HN + Reddit pull) · dashboard · next.
make-me-unicorn (MMU) encodes that long tail. ~550 checks across 6 progressive gates — M0 Problem Fit → M1 Build Fit → M2 Revenue Fit → M3 Trust Fit → M4 Growth Fit → M5 Scale Fit — each classified Safe-to-auto-apply or Risky-needs-review. Static analysers check syntax; MMU checks the meta-quality of what was generated.
Launch gates — what each one actually checks
6 progressive gates · ~26 canonical items shown · ~550 checks across the full library. Click a gate.
- One ICP is clearly defined
- Problem statement is written in one sentence
- Existing alternatives are mapped
- One or two success metrics are defined
Source: docs/checklists/from_scratch.md. Auth, billing, release-readiness, and SEO checklists add the rest.
Continuously updated as the stack moves
MMU keeps pace with the surfaces solo builders actually use. v0.5 (Mar 2026) made every passing checklist a growth channel — an auto-generated launch-readiness badge, a shareable score card, industry blueprints, a Product Hunt kit.
v0.6 (May 2026) ships MMU as a
Claude Code plugin (Anthropic Agent Skills spec) and exposes
mmu serve-mcp so any MCP-compatible
agent — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Gemini CLI — can call
blueprints and templates as native tools. The new
mmu validate <idea> pulls real
HN + Reddit threads, runs local sentiment, and surfaces candidate
competitors before a line of code is written.
Status
Live on PyPI — pip install make-me-unicorn.
Public, MIT-licensed. README in five languages: English, 한국어, 日本語,
简体中文, Español.
Related reading on Minbook
- MMU Build Log — full series: from sourcing the checks through PLG share design and security.
- The Code Was Done, But Everything Else Wasn't — the gap MMU fills, in one post.