mips_avatar
This isn't about how to build an AI-native startup, it's
how to use Anthropic tools to automate 2019 style app
building. An AI native startup would have AI infused into
the product, and Anthropic doesn't want anyone but them to
sell AI.
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> samantp
And looks like most of the document writing has been
done by Claude. And that too a stereotype one (yawn)
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> > digitaltrees
...And that insight is what changes everything.
But not in the way people expect...My wife laughs
when I sent texts in claude speak and requests it
when she needs a quick giggle.
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> > zombot
It's like with those scam emails with bad grammar,
a filter for the target audience.
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> david_shi
They don't want you in the bake-off.
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> volkk
pretty apt actually. After skimming through it, it's
mostly a big sales pitch on how to use Claude wrapped
in AI slop with generic startup advice.
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> zombot
Of course they want others to explore use cases for
them to isolate themselves from the risks. Once the
dust settles, they will cut out the middle man. And in
the meantime they had someone to sell their slop to.
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jreynar
It's nice to see an explanation of how they think you
should use Claude for a host of different job functions /
aspects of building a business, but the tone makes it seem
like founding a startup is something you wake up one
morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to
the park. Over coffee, you ask Claude about your idea and
when it tells you "you're a genius" you're off. That's
silly in so many ways. Statements like this "Validation
cycles that used to take months now take afternoons" have
an element of truth but ring with false promise.And that
relates to the lack of timelines and focus on how long
things took around 2020 BC, that is Before Claude.
Building a startup isn't like having a lemonade stand as a
kid where you just don't bother to do it if you forget to
buy lemons or it's rainy or something more fun comes
along. There's a significant compound interest element to
startups that's easy to overlook. Your codebase grows over
time and so does your feature set and that collection of
features attracts customers in a way one thing might not.
You learn as go, of course, too.This seems particularly
relevant to the GTM section, which I was particularly
amused by since that's what I'm focused on right now. It's
a long game. Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in
Google until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn
post isn't read without the followers you need to
accumulate and your content has to get engagement for
people to see it even then, you don't start off line with
a million followers on X, etc.
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> gurjeet
> 2020 BC, that is Before ClaudeTo avoid confusion and
improve clarity, I propose 'BCC': Before Claude,
Codex, et al.
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> > sakesun
AD is for After Deepseek
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> nekooooo
exactly. validation by _whom_ exactly? not your
customers!
|
> doctoboggan
> Your blog post doesn't get found by anyone in Google
until you've built up your SEO mojo, your LinkedIn
post isn't read without the followers you need to
accumulate and your content has to get engagement for
people to see it even then, you don't start off line
with a million followers on X, etc.I hate that this is
true. It's the worst part about selling stuff online
IMO and I found that you have to spend so much time
doing it. In many cases, selling something online can
be optimized to the extreme such that spend on
marketing should be as high as possible and spend on
the product R&D, manufacturing, support, etc should be
minimized as much as possible. This equation gives you
the most profit, but also gives the customer the
absolute worst product that is possible to
sell.Capitalism doesn't really have a solution to this
problem that I've seen yet.
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> > weitendorf
I think you either need to split your time in
between 100% product and 100% marketing or have a
founding team that is able to do both - not just
"marketing" but the ability to build and leverage
a personal + corporate brand and get specific
influential people to work with you on social
media and for PR.The "build in public" thing sort
of works if your customer base is other
aspirational founder-developers but also has
saturated and become less useful. I think the
stakes for what constitute a credible and
trustworthy product are higher now that AI has
lowered the bar for new entrants to get
"something" working; in a way it's almost
discrediting now to market something
not-quite-ready because randoms on reddit can just
as easily do that, and it signals something very
different now than it used to.There's also a bias
towards noticing the noisy advertisers a lot and
not how many other startups (some of which are
quite large) mostly market through different
channels or specialized buyers, and so assuming
they don't exist. HN doesn't realize how many
deeper tech companies there actually are because
of that; generally IMO the bleeding edge SV
technology companies are about 1-2y ahead of what
you see as a product consumer/commentariat.
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> > pgraf
This problem really bothers me as well. I think
that ultimately this problem boils down to
reducing search cost[0], which the internet has
already partially done. I think AI will reduce
them further if it is not captured by the
advertisement industry for the average user.
However, we cannot assume a fully rational
customer in the real world. Especially in
software, the customer does not know what they are
looking for most of the time. Further they cannot
evaluate how good your offering is vs competitors
without investing a significant amount of time,
which in turn increases search cost.[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_cost
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> > fragmede
Capitalism's solution to this "problem" is
competition. If your widget sucks, but is cheaper,
and mine is more. expensive, but better, then it's
up to consumers to differentiate. eg Dyson makes
expensive versions of gadgets. Some people see the
value, others call them overpriced and then
complain when the cheap knockoff sucks. It's -an
imperfect system, but the free market is the
solution to that problem.
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> empath75
> the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is
something you wake up one morning and just decide to
do instead of, say, going to the park.I'm not sure
it's a crazy idea when you can run a whole revenue
generating company with basically zero employees. You
could have a successful 'startup' generating 200k in
revenue a year, you just need to cover the cost of
your anthropic subscription.
|
hypfer
Feels like a category error.It's a slide deck telling
people what a product can do (that's a normal thing to
release for a company), but the thing it tries to sell you
on is building your own business based on their tool.Which
makes no sense the way they sell it, because "founding a
business" is no standard process that could be formalized
in a way like that, nor does it make sense for society to
have people founding businesses at a scale comparable with
mowing your lawn or doing your taxes.All of this feels
just unreal because it is unreal. Founding cannot be a
commodity. If it is, you have no moat or point, meaning
you instantly collapse again, because you are an
interchangeable commodity.
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> Planktonne
It makes sense if you think of 'founder' as an
identity like 'influencer', rather than 'someone
actually seriously founding a business'; just as with
influencers, some people will make a lot of money
doing it for real, but many, many more will post
enthusiastically on social media, living the
aesthetic.A lot of people already treat being a
founder/entrepreneur as who they are, not what they
do--witness the endless tide of LinkedIn posting about
hustle culture, divorced from reality. This is an
extension of startup chic.
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> > zero_
this is well said. and to me this is crazy and sad
at the same time.
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> > kristianc
An enormous amount of LinkedIn appears to be more
about gatekeeping what other people can do than
doing anything yourself.
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> > DonHopkins
They sell decorations, refreshment, cakes,
costumes, games, and invitations for Founder
Cosplay Parties.
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> dmujic
Yeah, and these days it really isn't a big deal to
build things; it's much bigger challenge to actually
develop a distribution channels and cut through the
noise. I think people are just overwhelmed with
everything and attention span is shorter and shorter.
And that's the real issue - what I am finding now is
that again the thing that really works is good old
actual human conversation with potential clients.
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> fsloth
"Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have no
moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse again,
because you are an interchangeable commodity."IMHO you
still need to find the product and PMFThere are bunch
of books startup world recommends which sort of all
start from the principle of product, users,
traction.This is sort of scaffolding around that. It's
not entirely insane to try to formalize this process -
there already are books that do this (Bill Aulet,
Disciplined entrepreneurship)."nor does it make sense
for society to have people founding businesses at a
scale"Maybe not at scale of moving lawns but I'm
pretty sure the world is full of nichces that still
lack specific software offering or where options of
software offerings are limited.This is like "Uber for
logging" or "time reservation system for cat dentists"
level of "take existing product category and apply to
a domain you know".So not every cat dentist needs to
found a cat dentist time reservation app but I'm sure
there are niches withing niches with business
opportunities awaiting.
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> > glaslong
Yesssss. think there is a wealth of opportunity
here in strictly non-scalable, probably even
strictly non-profitable ways.Where "founder"
paints exactly the opposite image of what it
really does unlock: everyone being able to build
or tweak a little app they need; tailored just for
their use cases.A market size of a few people, a
dozen, or a hundred, who can now get software that
exactly services their niche. Something you'd
never ever convince someone to build or maintain
for you beyond the "smart niece/nephew"
charity.Could be a website for your local soccer
league, a Bible reader with different font and
bookmark treatment, a chart of your home canning
cellar where you can send some jam to your friends
and they send you kimchi.There are probably nigh
infinite tiny microcosms of unserved automation
and functionality need like this. Where you can
make the computer do what YOU need, not what a
minimum of thousands-millions of other people
mutually needed in the least common
denominator.There might even be a few larger needs
in there we've missed, because they never got the
chance.
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> > DonHopkins
> Uber for loggingLumberjack gig economy?
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> thih9
We have seen that category in the past, in MLM.Perhaps
now it's only two levels but still somehow pyramid
shaped.
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> Gooblebrai
> Which makes no sense the way they sell it, because
"founding a business" is no standard process that
could be formalized in a way like thatIt makes no
sense, but most technical people wished it could be
like that and that's who this article is aimed at
|
> > hypfer
Yes but that means that it is lying in people's
face. Really just straight-up lying.
No fancy words to soften it. Just lies.Lying is
bad.
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> > > Gooblebrai
As said in Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember. Is
not a lie, if you believe it"
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> > > > hypfer
How people cope with their delusion is
irrelevant tho.They're delusional. They
must stop
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> uxhacker
Their argument on page 10 is that now agentic coding
reduces the effort of writing code there will be far
more failures unless you validate the idea properly.We
are actually seeing that in that the number of apps on
the app stores is increasing but usage is not
increasing.Some would argue that the right process
will lead to the right results.
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> > DonHopkins
> there will be far more failures unless you
validate the idea properlyYou are exactly correct!
You're very insightful to see that AI is perfect
for validating ideas. It's not just sucking up,
it's swallowing. Would you like to delve into
coding up a Synchopancy as a Service web site?
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> > teaearlgraycold
The barrier to entry drops and so more garbage
enters the market. This has happened many many
times but there can be a massive and beautiful
paradigm shift at the same time. Think about
YouTube. Most stuff on there is garbage, but
compare the good stuff of today to pre-YouTube
content. To be quite honest, I think most of the
best media is going straight onto YouTube.
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> weatherlite
I think a lot of founding is pretty much a commodity,
e.g coming up with a viable idea and then implementing
it has become rather easy now with these tools. The
real barriers are access to capital and clients. From
the startup I joined (I'm the 6th person) I see how
much the founders personal connections are important.
That indeed can't be commoditized yet. But the process
of coming up with an idea and iterating on it ? The
founders didn't even come up with our idea - they
thought of something initially but the investor led
them to his own idea - totally different. That's how
the company was born. Now the first clients are
connected to the investors. Etc.So access to capital
and clients, connections ,that's the last standing
moat I think.
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> > benfortuna
It's a commodity in the same way that making music
is a commodity (i.e. using production tools to
make it sound good). But music today is so much
more generic and boring than it used to be.
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> > hypfer
You seem to be mistaking the "rules" of the ZIRP
SV nonsense bubble for the rules of
reality.Understandably so, but still.
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> zingar
It's reasonable to say that there are things like
discovery and validation that are necessary for every
startup (to succeed) and that some techniques for
these can be automated.That we can describe something
like "validation" in the abstract and automate some
part of it says nothing about whether it's worthwhile.
I'm hard pressed to think of anything that anyone pays
for that doesn't meet this description. Why should
being a founder be special or different?
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> perks_12
Welcome to the world of companies founded by business
school grads. No soul, no moat, just an endless cycle
of KPIs and billion-dollar exits to PE.
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> > sire-vc
What makes a company founded by an non-MBA have a
soul? Only a true Scotsman deserves a billion
dollar exit presumably.
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> > Esophagus4
Come on, get out of here with this "only true
programmers can found a real company"Such
gatekeeping.
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> brunoborges
> Founding cannot be a commodity. If it is, you have
no moat or point, meaning you instantly collapse
again, because you are an interchangeable
commodity.With the recent AMD announcement [1], local
models are likely the future indeed. Cloud will be the
place for remote sessions, remote agents, continuous
agents. But I foresee a place where phones, laptops,
PCs, and even perhaps dedicated hardware just for AI,
will be the place for most AI-related workloads.
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> logicchains
>nor does it make sense for society to have people
founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing
your lawn or doing your taxesIt absolutely does. AI
and robots drives the cost of labour down; it's good
for capital, bad for labor. If everyone is a business
owner then everyone can benefit. A hundred years ago
the majority of Americans were self-employed; mass
wage labor is a recent phenomenon.
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> > trollbridge
If that's what's actually going to happen. If
people start businesses entirely dependent on
Anthropic's ecosystem, they're more akin to
drivers for Uber who basically are employees now
stripped of employee wage protection.If it's a guy
starting his own taxi service with his own app he
paid a guy $2000 in Ukraine to produce (as a guy
where I live did), that's different.
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> bdcravens
The same is true of building a startup based on Rails
or React.
|
> > trollbridge
Maybe next we can get a blog post from Herman
Miller telling you the "playbook" for how to run
your startup on tables and chairs.
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> akoboldfrying
> "founding a business" is no standard process that
could be formalizedDoes experience founding a business
make you better at founding another, unrelated
business? I would say it does to some extent.
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> > trollbridge
It often doesn't. A common mistake of a successful
founder is thinking they can repeat it. Those who
can are exceedingly rare.
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rienbdj
This feels like a "sell the shovels" move. Social media is
full of "this one prompt to get rich quick". It's the new
"one weird trick".
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> sire-vc
The LLM secret techbros don't want you to know.
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> edu
Build a $1B startup. Make no mistakes. /s
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> > Lionga
"I will send you to jail if you fail" really makes
it work all of the time
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> > > brohee
I know in which DC you are hosted and will cut
your electricity off.
|
throwaw12
I like how dates and copies are still the ultimate version
control:"<filename>-05062026_v3 (1).pdf"So there were 4
iterations on 5th of June alone for this document
|
> y-curious
A beautiful analogy for non-technical founders
creating software products with AI. There are version
control systems, but who needs them when you can name
your pdf `n-final-updated-6-16-final-donottouch.pdf
(1)(2)`
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> > trollbridge
And a good file store and organiser is arranging
all kinds of icons in different corners on your
desktop.
|
OtherShrezzing
>As an AI-native startup founder, your responsibility is
to know what's in your
codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and
not ship obvious
vulnerabilities to real users who are trusting you with
their data.This is fairly funny coming from the company
whose employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per
engineer per day, and accidentally leaked their own source
code through a security misconfiguration in a package
manager they own.
|
> supriyo-biswas
> your responsibility is to know what's in your
codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors,
and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real usersIt
seems like CYA; with all the marketing about how LLMs
will solve all problems it was really surprising to
see that, but legal probably told them to go easy on
it.
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> etoxin
Hundreds of PR's per engineer per day! They would have
zero visibility of their code. Their AI's would have
no visibility of the million plus lines of code.Sounds
super stable and cool.
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> vovavili
The best way to learn is from other people's mistakes.
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> geraneum
Yeah this is a Mythos pitch.
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> koe123
100 PRs a day? I am sure this is hyperbole but
otherwise you have a quote for me?
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> > zingar
100 feels low given I just saw dependabot do 8 in
one hour. No AI required!It matters a lot what
size the PRs are, and this varies wildly from
place to place. I spoke to someone who instituted
a "no PRs over 500 lines" rule. I would refuse to
even read something that big unless it was just a
find and replace or boilerplate.
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> > > koe123
Who reviews these 100s of PRs tho? 100 PRs in
an 8 hour workday = 1 PR every 4.8 minutes.If
I saw this happening in my org it would be a
huge red flag, am I old?
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> > > > zingar
It would matter a lot if there were 5
people reading/writing code or 100.
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> > owebmaster
Here's your quote:"employees report merging in
hundreds of PRs per engineer per day"
|
petterroea
This should be obvious but why would you trust what the
spade seller says about being an AI-native startup.Even if
you believe AI-native startup is the future (the comments
are divided), you would at least want to hear from an
impartial source.This is just marketing material.
|
evilrabbit99
Does this include making annoying Linkedin posts every
other day about how AI 30x'ed your engineering output and
killed graphic design for real this time?
|
bob1029
> Now someone with no engineering background can build
production
software that brings their idea to life, while a
technically adept founder with little business knowledge
can easily produce a go-to-market strategy, a financial
model, and a highly polished pitch deck.I had a bit of a
laugh. The non-technical business experts are much more
likely to achieve success than the technical experts. They
can actually talk to the customer and get the customer to
care. No quantity of GPUs and gas turbines can correct for
a lack of personality or reputation. The technology is
generally not the hard part in most businesses, despite
the extreme efforts of certain technology people to make
it seem so.
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OsrsNeedsf2P
I looked at the PDF and confirm there is nothing of value
in there.
|
kubb
I'm pretty sure the one place people will never believe AI
can be applied is "being a founder".There's just too much
invested, in terms of beliefs and money into the idea that
founders are special and therefore deserve seven-eight
figures off of the capital pumped into their unprofitable
products.You'll see it here in comments. People will
defend A"I" applied to software engineering wherever (not)
possible, but building companies? Now listen buddy there's
an irreplaceable human genius at work.
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> mentalgear
Exactly, I always find it ridiculous how the suits,
any layer of mid-managment to executives, are so eager
on AI 'outsourcing' everything, but they themselves
think the 'outsourcing' (if it really works) would
stop just before their position.
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> > Imustaskforhelp
I agree with you and adding on to it,Anecdotally,
Someone I know said that their manager just asks
them if they have drank water or not and motivate
them, and the company wants them to make on their
personal time what they are building with AI and
showcase it.So they were joking that they were
building a replacement of their manager using
Claude, and although they were joking, but only
partially.If anything, the managers, rationally
speaking might be the one to be outsourced.Of
course, though recently I have come to realize
that world isn't completely rational but I have
found that on the long term, it still rewards for
rational behaviour (sometimes) so I think that
these managers on Linkedin should feel a bit
scared... (as they are probably just prompting AI
to write the linkedin-texts)What if they are
already scared and this is their way of coping
with it? Nobody wants their job to be redundant
and I wouldn't say that tech is completely scott
free but rationally I find that tech has this
taste/authenticity factor and there are too many
factors but I must admit that these AI companies
are succeeding in trying to force the narrative
about jobs being completely redundant combined
with job market, to make the labour vs capital
divide even larger.I feel as if this is why people
want to be on that side of the battle and this
Linkedin-Ai-founder-syndrome is a symptom not the
cause.We engineers are trying to optimize from the
tech side through let's say AI to building lots of
tools that we otherwise couldn't have had made due
to lack of time but we had many ideas from any
issues we face at tinkering/work etc..and the
managers not having to do any of it, lack the
ideas in that aspect but they succeed in trying to
project something even if the reality of that
thing doesn't exist. So they are trying to do
that.I don't know, I don't believe much in the
divide of engineer vs manager but the fight is
larger than it but we are infighting...We are all
just fighting to get to the other side of the line
of a broken system but oh well, so it is and I am
unsure in what capacity can we fix it but I still
hope deep down that things will improve for better
because I guess hope is what makes us human.
|
> jstummbillig
Why would that be true? Successful founders have to be
unsentimental by nature. If you make it harder on
yourself than it has to be, you just get killed by
people who don't.
|
> swiftcoder
You know, I've been fairly convinced we could automate
CEOs away since... ChatGPT 3.5 or thereabouts?
|
> empath75
I demo'd an automated agent platform here and showed
it doing PRs, and the CEO asked me what i'd do for a
living after this did all my work for me, and I said,
"What do you think that you do that an agent can't
do?".
|
> > kelseydh
While you're not wrong the problem is they own the
company or the board listens to them. They have
power they can use to keep existing while you
don't. This is why AI is so scary to working
professionals.
|
Oras
AI has changed the build for sure, it is a lot easier to
build now, a lot easier to practice multiple copywriting
ideas, do market research ... etc.There is something that
will never change for being a founder, you need to sell,
and for that you need network and credibility. It was
never about the building, its all about the selling. AI
has not changed that.
|
> ElProlactin
> AI has not changed that.But it has. AI can help you
do market research, develop buyer personas, evaluate
potential customers, create, analyze and enrich
prospect lists, evaluate marketing channels, create ad
copy, write sales scripts, think through objections
and how to respond, etc.Will it turn you into Jordan
Belfort? No. Will it be 100% successful or effective?
No. But can it help enough to make a difference? Sure,
in enough cases.
|
> > sturza
Assumption: now everyone can do more of the above.
The final line is still selling. So everyone will
get to the sales part, FASTER. Triage will still
happen at this stage, regardless of AI. You won't
be able to avoid this triage, regardless of how
fast you get there.
|
> > > agumonkey
I can't find a name to dig more but the
"everyone will get" part is something strange
to me. If everybody has the same capability
increase, then what changed really ? some
would even say it will increase the paradox of
choice.. more offer, still the same amount of
time to decide, or maybe more AI based
decision to match the amount.. so less human
understanding.
|
> > > > sturza
"everyone". it's there, it's accessible,
it's "cheap". acceleration will depend on
the operator capability. if the final
product will make a diff in the real
world, it will ALWAYS depend on the
entrepreneur, not the tools used.
|
> > > sdevonoes
By that logic, same can be said about code.
So, ig everyone "gets there" equally fast,
then nobody has an advantage
|
> > > > sturza
The difference is the destination. Me
crunching code with llms vs you doing the
same thing will lead both of us to
different places(let's say equally fast
for the sake of the conversation). What
will set us apart in the end is who will
actually sell it, and that's
llm-independent.
|
> > _fizz_buzz_
Unfortunately it feels close to zero sum to me. I
am getting absolutely drowned in AI generated
personal sales pitches now. That obviously scraped
my name/company online and automated the email. I
feel sales becomes even more relient on trade
shows and conferences and person to person
interaction (Only talking about B2B stuff that I
am involved in).
|
> > jurgenaut23
If anything, AI has made it more difficult and
challenging because every customer and investor is
drowning in AI-generated collaterals, websites,
etc. The situation is dire in the academic world,
where both the applicants and the reviewers now
rely so heavily on AI that both publishing and
financing has turned into a lottery.I am positive
this will settle down at some point, but the
difference will always remain about your own
abilities, not that of AI.
|
> > > ElProlactin
> If anything, AI has made it more difficult
and challenging because every customer and
investor is drowning in AI-generated
collaterals, websites, etc.In many markets,
yes. If you're a software buyer, for example,
your inbox, LinkedIn, etc. is filled with
AI-generated sales outreach. And you know it's
AI.But keep in mind that there are tons of
markets (think local services) where buyers
aren't familiar with AI. They don't know that
what they're reading was produced by AI, and
they wouldn't care.In these markets, if you
use AI, you have a realistic shot at being
"better" than your competition, and if you use
it even a little bit more effectively, it can
make a real difference.
|
> > > > jurgenaut23
I get it, but it is still more difficult
to achieve differentiation from your
less-skilled competitor in the short term,
because they can simply slop their way
through, at least until prospects realize
that this is a bag of sh%t
|
> > > > watwut
> They don't know that what they're
reading was produced by AI, and they
wouldn't care.It does not matter of they
are drowning in it. If their inbox is
filled with slop pitches, whether AI or
not, they will stop reading.
|
> > > Esophagus4
The same thing happened in other businesses
where it became easier than ever to put out
content or product, but harder to break
through because of all the saturation.
|
> > > > tychez
Exactly.The music business is really the
perfect example.You can argue it has never
been easier to break through in music.You
can also argue that it has never been more
difficult.I think what all this ultimately
does is make it harder for the person who
would have been doing the activity
regardless.There are a few on the margins
that would not have had opportunity but
now do. Most of those though are just
noise generators making life more
difficult for the person who would have
been there either way.
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> > LtWorf
AI generated market research won't necessarily
match reality.
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> > > nieksand
Nor will human generated market research.
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> > > ElProlactin
And? Spending 1000s of hours searching on
Google, reading human-written market research
reports, etc. won't necessarily "match
reality" either.AI is a tool. A starting
point. A feedback mechanism. It's not the end
all or be all.
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> > dakolli
If you're using AI for your marketing you're going
to get lumped into a slop category, with plenty of
other products to keep you company. Only people
with AI psychosis actually believe this garbage.
All LLM output has a cheap stench to it that's
impossible to ignore.There is no shortcut to
hardwork, but llms somehow have people thinking
that is the cases, it plays so well into people's
desire to be as lazy as possible.
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> > > ElProlactin
Outside of the tech/AI bubble, you'd be amazed
at how few people can spot AI-generated
content, and how few people seem to care if
they think the AI-generated content speaks to
their needs.I know a small business that
generates many of their leads by responding to
posts on social media. They recently started
using AI to create personalized comments
responding to these posts instead of generic
comment templates they used before. The number
of leads they're generating from their social
media commenting has skyrocketed.
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> > > > dakolli
comments yes, because people have their
guard down. Its just lazy. Good for them I
guess, until they lose their accounts or
someone like me notices and puts them on
blast.
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> > > > > ElProlactin
Nobody cares. That's the thing. If
you're using AI in a relatively
"thoughtful" way to more efficiently
provide information that's of value,
the average person isn't concerning
themselves with the fact the end
product was produced by AI.Facebook,
Instagram, LinkedIn are flooded with
AI content. A lot of it is "slop",
yes, and it's kind of annoying if you
know where it came from, but you're
missing the big picture if you deny
the reality, which is that if AI
content is created in a way where it
does have some value, average people
appreciate the value and don't have
some ideological hang-up over how it
was created.AI is just a tool. It can
produce absolute rubbish, but it can
also produce some decent stuff too.
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> bdcravens
> ... its all about the selling. AI has not changed
that.Nor did the web, or mobile, or any other
innovation. That doesn't mean you can't build your
business around an innovation.
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> hatefulheart
With all due respect this reads a little deranged. To
sell something to the masses you fundamentally need a
product to sell. I'll agree that how you market the
product can be a "product" in itself, but that only
gets you so far. If it was never not about the
building why waterfall vs agile why velocity why
stakeholder why business analysts why meetings why
board members pushing for features?This is like when
AI bros claim that AI has changed absolutely
everything for their project but the first thing they
do is reach for docker compose, react and postgres.
Why don't you forget the bloat and have your LLM make
your container, vdom differ and lightweight DB?It's
very surreal to have to point this out.
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> > konradb
It doesn't read deranged at all to me.To sell
something to the masses you fundamentally need a
product to sell. Agreed.And you fundamentally need
a way to find the customers for that product that
need it at the time.And you fundamentally need a
way to interact with those customers that can
persuade them to use your product.Lots of aspects
are vitally important to the overall success.
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> > > hatefulheart
Ok but is it not fair to say that without the
first thing all of those things are
irrelevant? Again, why are we even having this
discussion? Ask Elizabeth Holmes how not
having a product (whilst doing everything else
you mentioned) goes.
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losvedir
I'm interested in the concrete technical stack that
"AI-native" start-ups use. No engineers and founders just
go to full production scale on something like Lovable? Or
code in GitHub, with something like Jules driving all the
development via GitHub issues and comments (sidenote: does
anyone have a good workflow for doing this with
Claude/GPT?).As someone who was the technical co-founder
of a company before AI, I really feel like a lot of that
role can be done by AI, if the foundation is laid
appropriately.
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Netcob
Especially as someone outside the US, building a startup
on AI sounds like a bad idea. Some AI company fails to pay
their bribes on time, or your country doesn't cede
territory to the US president, the AI gets yoinked and you
are left with Mistral or Qwen.(Technically that also
applies to MS Teams, Google and so on and not just AI)
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> Sammi
The platform risk for people outside the US using US
based AI products is enormous, as we just learned when
Fable got yoinked.
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> superkickstart
Even worse if you build your processes around one ai
provider like anthropic.
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asim
> The traditional startup growth arc assumes that the path
from idea to scale
is validate → raise → hire → build → raise again
→ grow → hire more → repeat.
Now, AI has erased the expectation that each new phase in
the startup lifecycle
requires a bigger team, a different skill set, and a fresh
funding round.From 2015-2019 I spent the whole time saying
"If I don't write the code nobody does". It was the point
of saying to do anything requires a team, to build that
team you need funding. It was a vicious cycle and took a
long time to get enough traction to raise funding and do
that... and then you end up in the MVP loop -> hire ->
build -> validate -> rehire -> rebuild -> revalidate.
Today all of that has changed. You don't necessarily need
the team to write the code, it's for a different function
entirely, maybe the original function which is the team
was the orchestration engine for all the different pieces
at play to make a company and product successful. The code
is only half the equation. Looking forward to seeing how
solo entrepreneurs leverage these tools and how teams
transform using them.
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> aswegs8
Feels like the people who want to do it spend their
time here arguing about it, and the people who will do
it are the ones in the trenches epxerimenting and
trying to make it work. The OP is just insight porn at
this point.
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geraneum
> Founders who've never written a line of code before are
shipping production applications, reaching revenue before
scaling headcountStats please
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> jeppester
I'm sure there are at least two in the world
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coffee
There is still so much old school thinking and process in
this. Go through this process that has been the same for
the last decade+ but now you just don't need a team of
people to do it. You can just use Claude instead! Really,
we are in a paradigm shift, not in a "do the same thing
but with less people" shift.
|
_pdp_
This framework does not sound that much different from
what people used to do but with AI agents and coding
assistants, and this is not going to work unless you are
lucky. LLMs cannot come up with good ideas and coding (if
you believe it is solved) is no longer moat especially in
the early stages.So either go viral or go home.Obviously
personal connections, timing, market position all play
role but let's be honest - this is not something that can
be planned although in retrospect it may seem so. A % of
the population will get all of this right many times in a
roll but this is just mathematical certainty.
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frangonf
A serious AI-native founder should not waste time reading
this brochures, they should make agentic loops instead
where their agents autonomously read and produce brochures
for their brochure first, product second startups.
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letier
My absolute favorite quote:Loss of objectivityThe
challenge: Ask an AI tool for evidence supporting what you
already believe,
and it will find it. Confirmation bias now comes with a
research engine.
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Standards1
is there a version of this that is: building a startup
that really helps customers?
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arun6582
Buying a welding machine doesn't make you a welder
|
> y-curious
Tell that to certain CEOs that realized they can
generate slop code and make their SWE teams deal with
the tech debt lol
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darepublic
They're after your picnic basket just remember. Nothing
will sate the bottomless appetite of Dario and his ilk.
But hey some good sound bytes about the importance of
humanity whilst carving you up like a turkey!
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59nadir
Are people upvoting this so more people can laugh at it?
This whole post comes off as a parody of what Anthropic
would say.
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rw2
Good guide but I think the product market fit portion of a
startup is so key that you need no other skills except
that to make a good startup. AI won't help you with that
portion, only in depth knowledge of a industry or natural
product intuition will.Who knows, maybe an AI ideated and
AI created product will be the best app of 2026.
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sublimefire
Reads like a Shopify ad. Just use their tool and you will
be able to achieve financial independence.
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