The story behind The Dragon Hoard

By the founder

I've had a stable job for years. Good pay, good people, reasonable hours. By any objective measure, I should be content.

I'm not content. Not in a dramatic, quit-everything way — more like a low-grade itch that won't quit. The kind where you catch yourself, mid-meeting, wondering what it would feel like to be building something of your own. Where the output is yours. Where the upside is yours.

So I started doing what everyone does: I went looking for ideas.

YouTube, mostly. Some newsletters. The occasional Reddit thread at midnight. I'd watch a forty-minute video to extract one concrete insight. I'd read a twelve-part blog series that turned out to be a funnel for a $997 course. I'd find something genuinely interesting buried in episode notes — a low-competition niche, a specific arbitrage, a service nobody was offering in my city — and think: I should write this down.

So I wrote it down. In Google Keep, then in a Google Sheet, then in a second Google Sheet when the first one got unwieldy. I had columns for time investment, startup cost, income ceiling, whether I'd actually enjoy it. I had colour coding. I had filters.

It was completely unsustainable as a personal system, and I kept doing it anyway.

The problem wasn't finding ideas. The internet is drowning in ideas. The problem was the signal-to-noise ratio.

Most "business ideas" content falls into one of two failure modes. The first is the motivational-poster genre: "Start a dropshipping store!" "Become a content creator!" No specifics, no numbers, no path from zero to dollar one. The second is the hustle-porn genre: "This guy makes $80k a month selling X" — one anecdote, no replication evidence, and a suspicion the real money is in selling the course about the thing, not the thing itself.

I wanted the stuff in the middle. Concrete. Specific. With a real example of someone doing it. Filtered to what was actually feasible for a person with a job and finite hours.

That's a weirdly hard thing to find at scale.

I work in software. When a manual process is eating your life, you automate it.

The first version was a Python script that scraped YouTube descriptions and RSS feeds and dumped everything into a JSON file. Then I added Claude to score each idea for viability, novelty, and completeness. Then I needed somewhere to put the scored ideas where I could filter and sort them. Then I thought: if I'm building this for myself, I should build it properly, in case anyone else has the same itch.

That's The Dragon Hoard.

The name comes from the way I think about this kind of research. A dragon doesn't accumulate treasure randomly — it curates. It guards what it has. Every coin in the pile earned its place.

That's the intent here. Not a list of everything. A hoard of the good stuff.

I'm not promising this is the idea that will change your life. I don't know your situation, your risk tolerance, your skills, or your city. What I can promise is that every idea in here passed a quality bar I actually believe in — because I built the quality bar for myself first.

If one idea out of a hundred is the one you run with, that's the whole point of having a hoard.