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Browse the notes, research, decisions, and workshops used to develop the series.

Search 577 documents about the world, characters, plot, research, decisions, workshops, and earlier ideas.

Current document iainreiddotdev/docs/SAAS_LAB.md

Private idea workspace

Purpose

The private idea workspace captures and manages multiple product ideas.

Its job is to help the owner:

Capture ideas quickly.
Understand what each idea is.
See the current stage of every idea.
Record the next action.
Keep notes and observations.
Pause, archive, or continue ideas.
Later test optional tools inside individual ideas.

It is not an AI idea generator, startup operating system, project-management platform, market-research tool, public directory, or validation framework.

Core model

The existing experiments table is the idea record. Internal code may still use the word experiment where renaming would add risk. The private admin UI uses idea, Ideas dashboard, and Idea workspace.

Primary private surface after admin login:

Ideas dashboard: /devsite/iainreiddotdev/admin/experiments.php
Idea workspace: /devsite/iainreiddotdev/admin/experiment.php?id=…

The public /devsite/iainreiddotdev/saas-lab/ page is the VibeKB portfolio showcase, not the management interface.

Idea lifecycle (status)

Status answers: Where is this idea in its lifecycle?

Status	Meaning
`inbox`	Freshly captured
`exploring`	Clarifying the idea
`validating`	Checking the problem/user fit
`building`	Building a usable loop
`testing`	Testing with real use
`launched`	Live / shipping
`paused`	Held, still active (not archived)
`archived`	Retired; kept for history

Legacy statuses from the first visibility phase are remapped on schema init:

framing → inbox
self-testing → testing
invite-testing → testing
public → launched

building and archived keep their values.

Visibility

Visibility answers: Who is allowed to access a gated experiment page?

private — administrators only
invite — administrators plus invited registered users
public — anyone

Status and visibility are independent. Authorization is derived only from visibility (plus admin/invite). Never from status. Archiving does not delete records and does not by itself change who can access a gated route.

Priorities

Application-validated priorities: low, normal, high.

New ideas default to status = inbox, priority = normal, visibility = private.

Codes and slugs

Idea codes are generated as IDEA-001, IDEA-002, … by inspecting existing

IDEA-NNN codes (not row count). Legacy codes are left unchanged.

Slugs are generated from the idea name (ASCII-safe, unique with -2, -3, …).

Slug editing remains under Access and deployment in the workspace.

Future tool rule

A future tool earns its place only when it:

Runs inside a specific idea,
Saves a useful result, and
Helps decide or perform the next action.

Intentionally deferred

AI integrations, competitor/market research, idea scoring, kanban/tasks, notifications, email, billing, teams, uploads, charts, and external APIs are out of scope for this phase.

Authentication: docs/AUTH.md
Visibility gates: docs/EXPERIMENT_VISIBILITY.md
Deployment: docs/DEPLOYMENT.md