We said MAYBE on August 28, 2026. Not settled — due August 28, 2027.
Read this with the caveat. We tested the engine that produced this verdict against 292 launches whose outcomes we already knew, and could not show it predicted which survived. Some of its data sources were also dead at the time of scoring. The verdict stays up, dated and unedited, because a record you can quietly revise is not a record — but it is worth less than it looked when it was written.
Demand is real but proven only through incumbent revenue, not through any visible pull: no HN, thin Reddit, flat search, no commercial keywords. The market is structurally winnable — small, generic agencies with obvious vertical and end-to-end gaps — but the wedge is sold, not searched. Best path is to pick ONE vertical, build a narrow productized offer plus a content/lead-gen asset, and validate with 3 paying local clients before treating this as a business.
Four established agencies/platforms are already charging money for local-business digital services, which proves budget exists — but social and search channels are nearly silent (10 Reddit posts, none large or on-topic, 0 HN threads, stable demand with no strong keywords), and one of the top posts is explicitly about how nobody buys 'digital transformation' as a category.
The incumbents are ordinary agencies with generic positioning and no network effects, capital moat, or procurement lock-in; the listed gaps (vertical-specific packages, end-to-end ops digitization vs. marketing-only, implementation+training retainers) are a concrete wedge a solo operator can execute by shipping and selling directly.
The axes lean build, but this is fundamentally a services business sold to the hardest buyer in existence: a local SMB owner who does not search for 'digitization', does not read Reddit or HN, and only buys after face-to-face trust-building. Search is flat with no keywords and the loudest on-topic post says the category itself is unsellable — meaning the operator's real cost is months of cold outreach, not shipping, and revenue caps out at whatever hours one person can bill.
What is worth more than this page. The register records what became of 6,266 real launches. No engine has to be right for that to be true.