Why it exists
firstfoot is built by Gajanan Rathod. Before this I shipped two products that no longer run. Neither was killed by the code. They were killed by the fact that almost nobody found out they existed, and by the time I understood that, I had spent months on features nobody had asked for because building was the part I knew how to do.
That is the ordinary way a small product dies, and it is very hard to see from the inside. The silence after launch looks identical whether the product was wrong, the audience was wrong, or you were simply standing in a room with nobody in it. I read it as the first one twice. It was the third one both times.
So firstfoot is the thing I wanted and could not buy: something that decides where to show up before a word gets written, earns the right to be there, and then tells me which part failed when a week goes quiet. Not another tool for producing more posts. I had no shortage of posts.
Why it refuses things
Every rule firstfoot enforces came from getting something wrong. The critic exists because a generator told not to be feature-led will be feature-led about a third of the time. The correction step on the brain exists because a version built only from public surfaces got a client's positioning exactly backwards. The evidence requirement exists because a sentence that cannot be traced to something true is how tools start inventing.
You can read the reasoning in the manifesto and the research behind it in the field notes. What the critic rejects shows it refusing real work rather than describing the idea.
Where it is
Pre-launch, taking a handful of founders at a time. The changelog says what works and what does not, including the parts that are still broken — there are three at the time of writing, and they are named.
The code is not public. firstfoot sells to technical founders, who are precisely the people who would run it themselves, and the prompts are most of the product. Built in the open, yes. Open source, no.
Reach me at gajanansr8@gmail.com. I read everything, and I would rather hear that firstfoot is wrong about your channels than not hear it.