Debrief

Validate ideas before you build.

Debrief is a platform designed to help founders and creators validate their startup ideas through instant, honest feedback from real users. Stop guessing and start validating.

🚀 Features

Debrief is one app with two halves that share an account and a database:

• The platform — post an idea, take it through a structured five-stage validation journey (The Forge), and collect feedback, votes and backing from the community. Pivots are recorded as versions, so the journey stays public and honest.
• Growth Lab (/game) — a live, facilitated growth-strategy simulation. Teams allocate a budget across seven marketing channels over six timed rounds and compete on efficiency.

👤 User Roles

Five roles, from least to most privileged. Each inherits everything the role above it can do.

Role	How you get it	Where it's enforced
Visitor	Not signed in	RLS: only visibility = 'public' ideas
Member	Sign in with Google	middleware.ts → protectedRoutes
Collaborator	Invited to an idea, invite accepted	idea_collaborators.role + RLS
Facilitator	Created a Growth Lab game	sim_games.created_by
Admin	Row in app_admins	requireAdmin() + public.is_app_admin()

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🌐 Visitor — not signed in

Everything public, nothing that writes.

• Browse the public idea feed (/).
• Open any public idea (/ideas/[id]) and read its Forge journey, feedback summary, backers and pivot history.
• Open a share link (/share/[id]).
• Read /privacy and /terms.

Private ideas are invisible — the database filters them out, not the UI. Visiting a members-only page redirects to /login?redirectTo=… and returns you there after sign-in.

👥 Member — signed in

Sign-in is Google OAuth only; there is no password flow.

Post and manage your own ideas

• Create an idea at /ideas/new.

• Work through The Forge, a six-stage journey:

  Stage	Focus
  0 · The Spark	The idea itself
  1 · Clarity	The problem
  2 · Reality	The market
  3 · Hypothesis	The test
  4 · Sustainability	The business model
  5 · Reflection	Proof of work

• Publish or hide your idea from the actions menu. ⚠️ New ideas are created private. They do not appear in the public feed until you switch visibility to public.

• Record a pivot — the previous version is kept, so the trail stays visible.

• Invite collaborators by email and remove them later.

• Delete your idea.

Take part in other people's ideas

• Vote, and remove your vote.
• Comment.
• Leave structured feedback against a specific Forge stage.
• Back an idea to signal you would use or fund it.

Earn badges

Badge	Earned by
First Step	Completing Level 1: Problem Clarity
The Builder	Completing the entire Forge journey
Constructive Critic	Giving feedback on 3 different ideas

Play Growth Lab — see Player below.

🤝 Collaborator — invited to someone else's idea

Invitations are accepted at /invites/[token]/accept. Permissions apply only once the invite is accepted, and only to that one idea.

	Viewer	Editor	Admin
Read a private idea	✅	✅	✅
Edit the idea and its Forge stages	—	✅	✅
Manage the collaborator list	—	—	✅
Delete the idea	—	—	✅

The idea's original owner always keeps full control regardless of the collaborator list.

🎮 Player — in a Growth Lab game

• Join a published game with its 6-character code at /game.
• Create a team, or join an existing one. A game auto-starts at 5 teams.
• Each round, split your budget across seven channels — Social Ads, Influencer Marketing, Content Marketing, Paid Search, Email Retargeting, Referral and PR. Each behaves differently over time: some fatigue, some compound.
• Watch the live leaderboard, ranked on efficiency (downloads per ₹1L spent), not raw spend.

The rules: 6 rounds · 2.5 minutes each · ₹1.5 Cr shared pool · ₹30L cap per team across the whole game.

Unpublished games are unreachable, including by direct code.

🧭 Facilitator — created the game

Whoever created a game gets a facilitator view of it, instead of a team view.

• Start the game when enough teams have registered.
• Advance rounds — scoring runs, results are written, and the next round opens. Teams that miss a round are scored as zero spend.
• See the full leaderboard and every team's results throughout.

A completed game is snapshotted to an archive automatically.

🛡️ Admin — listed in app_admins

Admin is granted by a row in the app_admins table, managed from the dashboard.

Analytics (/admin/analytics)

• Users & Growth — signups and activity.
• Idea Pipeline — ideas and their progress through the Forge.
• Simulation Game — participation across all games.
• Settings — add and remove admins.
• Export any of the three as CSV.

Growth Lab console (/game/admin)

• Create a game and get its join code.
• Publish toggle — switch each game between Visible to players and Hidden. New games start hidden, so a session is opened deliberately.
• Browse archived games with date filtering, and open any past leaderboard.

Admins can read and update every game regardless of who created it.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Framework: Next.js 15+ (App Router)
• Language: TypeScript
• Styling: Tailwind CSS v4
• UI Components: shadcn/ui (Radix UI)
• Database & Auth: Supabase
• State Management: TanStack Query
• Forms: React Hook Form + Zod

🏁 Getting Started

We welcome contributions! Follow these steps to set up the project locally.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• npm (the repo ships a package-lock.json)
• A Supabase project (for local dev, you'll need the credentials)

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/mulearn/debrief.git
   cd debrief

2. Install dependencies

   npm install

3. Environment Setup

   cp .env.example .env.local

   Fill in the three required values. .env.example documents each one and the optional email and Redis blocks:

   Variable	Purpose
   NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL	Supabase project URL
   NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY	Anon key, used by the browser
   SUPABASE_SECRET_KEY	Service-role key. Bypasses RLS — server only

   Note: Ask the maintainers for test environment credentials if you don't have your own.

4. Apply the database migrations Run everything in supabase/migrations/ in filename order against your Supabase project. Read supabase/migrations/README.md first — two pairs of files share an ordinal, and it explains why they must not be renumbered casually.

   To make yourself an admin, add your email to the app_admins table.

5. Run the development server

   npm run dev

   Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

🤝 Contributing

We love contributions! whether it's fixing bugs, improving documentation, or building new features.

1. Fork the Project
2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
5. Open a Pull Request

Please make sure to update tests as appropriate and follow the existing coding style.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Acknowledgements

• Built by the µLearn community.