Your Privacy Choices

Business Idea Validator Privacy Notice

Little Business Works · Last updated: 23 September 2026

This notice explains what information the Business Idea Validator collects, what we do with it, and how you can ask us to delete your saved validation.

Questions about this notice, or deletion requests, go to hello@littlebusinessworks.com.

1. What you submit

The Validator is a seven-step questionnaire. You enter:

your business idea (a description in your own words),
your location/target market,
your available startup budget,
the hours you can commit per week,
your relevant experience or skills,
your target customer, and
your desired monthly income.

We do not ask for your name, email address, postal address, phone number, or payment details as part of the questionnaire. The Validator itself does not log IP addresses and does not track you with cookies, analytics, or advertising software. The only outside request your browser makes when you open the Validator is loading its font from Google Fonts, which receives standard request information (such as your IP address) — it receives nothing you type.

You do not need an account to use the Validator. No username or password is created.

2. What we store

When you complete a validation, we save a permanent record that includes your seven answers, the scores and report we produce, the research findings connected to your idea, and the date the validation was created.

Your answers are free text you type yourself. If you include personal information in them (for example your name or details about your circumstances), that information is stored as part of your validation.

We also keep technical diagnostics about each research run (timestamps and hashed, non-identifying values) and an order record for any purchase you make (order reference, amount, currency, date — see section 4).

We do not log IP addresses, and we do not store cookies or tracking identifiers on your device.

3. What is sent to Perplexity

To research demand, competition and costs for your idea, we transmit your seven answers to Perplexity, our AI research provider (an "Agent" research call with web search). The API key used to call Perplexity exists only on our server and is never exposed to your browser.

Perplexity's own processing of that research request is governed by Perplexity's privacy terms, which are separate from this notice.

If live research cannot be completed, we will inform you that the research was unsuccessful rather than present unsupported findings as validated results. You may be offered an opportunity to retry.

4. Payments and Shopify

Purchasing the full validation report (US$14.99) is handled by Shopify, our checkout and payments provider, on Shopify's hosted checkout pages. Your card details are entered on Shopify's systems and are processed under Shopify's privacy terms — we never receive or store your card number.

When you complete a purchase, we store a payment order record with us (order reference, amount, currency, date) and the identifier that links the purchase to your validation.

We keep payment and transaction records for accounting and tax purposes, and we retain them even if you ask us to delete a validation (see section 6). If you have deleted your validation, the retained transaction record no longer contains your contact details or your report.

5. Your report link

After validation you receive a link to your saved report. The link is the only way to open the report — there are no accounts, passwords, or sign-ins.

**Anyone who has the link can open it and see the report. If you have paid, the link opens the full version, which includes your original answers. If you have not paid, the link opens a free summary version only.

Treat your report link like any unsecured, unlisted URL: do not post or share it. If you lose your link there is no recovery — we have no account system and cannot re-issue a link to you. If you want to remove a report from where it could be found, delete it (section 6 — please note deletion may also affect another user who submitted identical answers, see below).

6. Retention and deletion

**We keep saved validations until you ask us to delete them. We do not automatically delete validations or reports after any fixed period. There is no automatic expiry — if you want your validation and stored answers gone, please ask us and we will delete them.

To request deletion, email hello@littlebusinessworks.com and include the link to your saved report. We verify the request, delete your validation (including your answers, scores, research findings, and report), and confirm to you by email once it is done. Your report link will stop working.

Two things to know about deletion:

Transaction records are kept. If you paid, the payment order record is kept for accounting and tax purposes with your contact details and report content removed.
Identical submissions share a link. If two people submit exactly the same answers with the same research results, they share the same saved validation. Deleting it removes it for both users, and we cannot split it.

If you did not include your report link in a deletion request, and you only provide an email address, we may not be able to find your validation (we collect none of your contact details until/unless you pay), so please keep your link safe.

7. Security

Your data travels over encrypted (HTTPS) connections. Webhook notifications from Shopify to our servers are verified by cryptographic signature, database access uses server-side secrets, and our research calls use a server-held key. No security is perfect, and links are only as safe as you keep your report link private.