Before getting to today’s new product idea, it helps to understand the lineage it comes from.
I’ve designed things with names like Marriage Insurance, Death Vending Machine, and Inspiration Vending Machine—projects that never got off the ground, mostly because no investor ever appeared. That’s fine. A new proposal has arrived: the Suspicion Management System.
There is a common thread running through all of these ideas. I have, by my own assessment, almost no business instinct. The things I come up with tend to be the kind of “brilliant demand” that turns out to have been exhausted by other people long ago. Shared private cars, errand services for blind dates, mass-produced ghostwritten homework, even auto-matching hookup apps—whenever I get excited about a product need, someone quickly informs me that the market has already been there, done that, and moved on. After enough of those moments, I began to accept a suitable professional title for myself: an expert in outdated product-demand analysis.
That said, the older concepts are still useful as background.
Marriage Insurance
The point of Marriage Insurance was never really the insurance itself. What it insures is a shared expectation stretched across time.
The mechanism was simple: at certain milestones, money would be returned. If the couple divorced, that payout disappeared. The demand it addresses is obvious enough. It works a bit like the old scene of a flower seller urging a handsome man to buy a flower for the woman beside him: buy one, and she’ll know your feelings are real. Marriage Insurance follows the same emotional logic. Buy the policy, and both people gain one more reason to keep working for the relationship.
Death Vending Machine
The idea behind the Death Vending Machine was to solve what it framed as the final pain point of suicide: pain itself.
A person would purchase a product advertised as the “least painful death,” take it home, and prepare to use it. Along with it would come a death tracker, a device that begins recording only after the suicide product has been used. It would sample the entire dying process: the degree of struggle, whether the method caused traumatic external injury, whether severe physical suffering appeared, and other indicators.
Afterward, the recorded data would function like an aircraft black box, preserving the user’s condition throughout the process. Behind that would be a complicated evaluation system: only a truly painless death would receive an extremely low score, perhaps even zero, from the device.
Part of the steep purchase price would be used to forcibly bundle suicide failure insurance. Compensation would only become available if the buyer survived, returned in person to the same machine, and entered the unique serial number tied to the purchased product after using it. Because the system would have collected fingerprint and voice information at the time of purchase, only the surviving buyer could trigger a claim. If the product failed to cause death, the customer would receive substantial compensation.
Inspiration Vending Machine
This one was meant to let capable people collide with each other’s ideas.
Why shouldn’t inspiration itself have a marketplace?
Some people have an endless supply of ideas they never manage to turn into finished work, whether from lack of time or lack of ability—though of course no one willingly admits to the second problem. Those unused ideas could be listed for sale. Someone with the energy, or the confidence, to develop them could browse the platform, pay an appropriate amount, and acquire a spark that might become something more valuable in their own hands.
The psychology here is very straightforward. Since nearly everyone considers themselves the more capable person, the buyer naturally thinks: this idea is great; you just weren’t able to execute it, so let me complete its destiny. On the seller’s side, unloading a pile of unused ideas allows them to insist that they are not incapable, merely overextended—and to make decent money from “idle” inspiration. Supply and demand both have clear motives, which is exactly what allows a platform like that to function.
The new idea: Suspicion Management System
Now to the current proposal.
The name is literal enough: this is a system for managing other people’s points of suspicion. But if we widen the frame a little, it can also be used on oneself.
The need is not hard to recognize. People say wild things all the time. They tell casual lies. They improvise stories. Someone else feeds us nonsense and, for a while, we believe it. As these suspicious details accumulate, contradictions inevitably start to surface. Avoiding exposure—or exposing someone else—actually requires a great deal of logic, memory, cross-referencing, and information organization. Unless you are dedicated to doing this for one specific person, it is an absurd amount of time and energy to spend.
Of course, most people would ask who on earth is bored enough to want such a thing. But a person not needing something does not mean no one needs it. Search the App Store for couple-tracking apps and you will find plenty of expensive subscription products. People know many of them are basically scams, and still pay for them. That kind of demand is impossible to ignore.
At the root of it, digging for the truth may be the most inexhaustibly entertaining part of romantic warfare. Location tracking solves an immediate, real-time need. A Suspicion Management System would operate across all three time dimensions.
- It collects and analyzes lies told in the past.
- It judges present behavior against past statements and flags contradictions.
- It uses those contradictions to make predictions about future behavior.
That is the investor-facing version, at least.
In ordinary language, the system gathers what someone has said and done, then hunts for places where those things don’t line up. If, in the future, that person says something that clashes with what came before, the system marks it as a suspicion point. From there, one suspicion can branch into countless possible explanations: maybe he lied, maybe he cheated, maybe he still loves me, maybe he doesn’t anymore.
External use: tracking another person’s contradictions
Used outwardly, the system serves anyone trying to organize the inconsistencies in someone else’s story. It turns emotional detective work into a structured process.
Instead of relying on scattered memory—half-remembered phrases, screenshots buried in chat logs, strange timelines that only feel wrong—the system turns those fragments into something sortable and analyzable. It is less about one dramatic revelation than about keeping a long-running record of tiny mismatches until they begin to form a pattern.
Internal use: maintaining your own lies
The more interesting side may be inward use.
For habitual liars, this system could be invaluable. No one remembers every single thing they have ever said, and once a person begins curating different versions of themselves for different audiences, sooner or later the story stops holding together.
A Suspicion Management System could classify and tag information according to things like:
- what I said
- who I said it to
- who might know whom
- what I told someone else
That kind of structure would help preserve the “perfect image” a person is trying to maintain across multiple relationships and social circles, reducing the chance that contradictory scripts expose the whole performance.
It could also issue warnings when two people who were never supposed to compare notes suddenly become acquainted, allowing the user to assess the bugs and risks in their own carefully maintained persona.
There is more to say about the Suspicion Management System, but that can wait until tomorrow.