The Reality Check Every Founder DreadedWhen you enter a fast-paced hackathon, the most dangerous thing you can do is fall in love with your first idea.When we joined the RevenueCat Shipathon 2026, our original plan was to build RedFlag—a tool designed around automated risk detection and user alerts. On paper, it sounded like a solid utility. We were excited, drafted some early wireframes, and started whiteboarding how it would work.Then we sat down and actually stress-tested the concept. And honestly? It fell apart.Why We Killed RedFlagKilling a project you’ve already started planning is painful, but as we looked closely at RedFlag, three huge problems stared back at us:The Scraping Nightmare: The core features relied heavily on automated web scraping and parsing unstructured data to catch hidden risks. It introduced endless edge cases, fragile setup rules, and a high chance of returning flat-out wrong information.Zero Reason to Subscribe: To build a real business with RevenueCat, you need to offer continuous, ongoing value. RedFlag felt like a tool someone would run once out of curiosity and then delete. Asking people to pay a monthly subscription for that made no sense.Low Daily Retention: Nobody opens a risk-checking app every morning. It had zero natural hooks to keep users coming back.We realized we were trying to force a weak concept to work just because we came up with it first. So, after evaluating seven different ideas, we scrapped RedFlag entirely and picked a problem we actually live through every day as students: the absolute chaos of applying for scholarships. The Pivot: Introducing EligibleWe pivoted to Eligible—a mobile app built to clean up the ad-filled, spam-heavy world of scholarship searches. Instead of dealing with unpredictable scrapers and low engagement, Eligible operates on a completely different model: Strict Binary Filtering: No loose keyword matches. If you don't meet a scholarship's GPA cutoff, major requirement, or location criteria, it gets hidden from your feed entirely. You only see what you can actually apply for. Built-in Application Tracker: Discovery is tied directly to a local tracking board (Not Started $\rightarrow$ In Progress $\rightarrow$ Submitted). Students have a real reason to open the app every single week to check deadlines and manage active applications. A Subscription Model That Makes Sense: The basic matching engine is free, while Eligible Pro ($2.99/mo or $19.99/yr) unlocks unlimited saved applications, push alerts for new matches, and exportable application checklists via RevenueCat. What We LearnedDropping RedFlag early was scary, but sticking with a flawed idea out of pride is worse. By switching to a deterministic, student-first solution, we gave ourselves a clear path to build an app that actually solves a real problem before the Shipathon clock runs out.