What Jonathan Greechan Taught Solo Founders About Building With AI

Hey everybody, welcome to this Founder Institute webinar. My name is Jonathan Grecian, co-founder and CEO of the Founder Institute, and we got a really interesting topic here today. And we had, I think it was over 400 people RSVP to this event. So kind of a validation of this trend that we are seeing growing in the world right now, and that is the solo founder trend. And I think it's really going to define the future of startups that we're going to see here in the next couple of years. So if you are joining in, let us know where you're joining in from. You know, these events, really the value of these events is not just the learning, okay? It's a lot more on the interaction. So please do use these events as an opportunity to, uh, to meet some other people that, uh, that maybe have some interests like you do, share ideas and things like that to help push your idea forward. Rarely does an entrepreneur succeed by working in isolation. They succeed by working in collaboration. By sharing their ideas, by getting feedback, by finding other people that share the same vision of them, and then pushing the business forward. So for the agenda today, we're going to do 3 main things. Number 1, I'm going to talk about really the opportunity that is being presented right now for solo founders, which is something that honestly has been unprecedented that we've seen, you know, at least in our history, the Founder Institute running acceleration programs and boot camps since 2009. Then I'm gonna go through really the process that we see solo founders going through to build these businesses utilizing all of these amazing AI tools that are coming out. And then finally, this last part is gonna be really a fun part of the event. This is what we call the Idea Lounge. So again, in keeping with that same theme that we want you to connect with other like-minded people here, share your ideas, start getting feedback. We're gonna have a lounge here at the end where you're gonna go back to that lounge area that you were just in before I came on the screen. You'll be able to connect with other founders, and we want to use this AI tool that we have built here to help you share your ideas, brainstorm ideas, and get feedback with other founders. And you can go to this tool at bit.ly/startupideaengine. We'll put it here in the chat for you. So that you can prepare for that networking portion of this event. Okay, so let's talk about the opportunity that we're seeing right now in AI. And if I were to sum it into one sentence, it literally would be that creation is being democratized. Okay, these AI tools, if you haven't noticed, went from just kind of being cool chatbots and things like that into fully autonomous agents, right? Which now can control your computer, can do tasks for you, can perform the tasks that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and big teams and months, and it can do it now in a matter of minutes, right? And in some cases, seconds. So these tools have really have taken a quantum leap, I'd say, in the last 6 to 8 months or so. And the crazy thing is that the quantum leaps are now— the time period in between them is becoming shorter and shorter. right? So in the beginning it took maybe 6 months or so cycle for them to come out with like a new frontier model. Now that is being compressed more and more and more because actually they're having the AI is actually helping to build the next models, right? So just the rate of increase here, guys, is exponential. So if you're using an AI tool today and you're saying, oh, this is kind of annoying, it's not perfect, just know that it will be soon, right? The next versions are gonna be exponentially better than what you're using now. We're gonna continue to see that moving forward. As a result, AI is changing work forever. All right. And I have a lot of— I'm from New York originally. I have a lot of friends that work on Wall Street, and a lot of people are really worried about, you know, losing their job and what it's going to do to the economy and things like that. And honestly, I tell them, you should be worried. You know, there's very specific industries— coding, finance, Legal, customer support, right? There's a lot of industries that are going to be turned on their head. Now, it's going to create a lot of other new jobs, right? But that's not going to be what happens first. Wall Street, as perverse as it is, like when somebody— it was who, I forgot who it was a couple of weeks ago, right? Cut a whole bunch of people. And what happened? Their stock shot up 20%, right? Why? Because they're saying, oh, we cut people because we're automating them using AI. Right. It's a signal to the market that they're being more efficient, and that is what the market is rewarding. So there's going to be a lot of cuts. Now, at the same time, you know, what I tell people is, look, you can either jump on the train or watch it pass you by. Right. The entrepreneurial thinkers are going to be the ones that will be empowered right now, even if you're not starting a company. Right. If you're the one who's thinking entrepreneurially within your business, if you're starting to use AI tools within your business or within your company, to identify new business opportunities, right, and to build, you know, kind of little products and little things within your big business, you're going to be the one that, that moves forward, right, and it gets promoted, and that they're— and that they see as the kinds of employees of the future who are going to be orchestrators of multiple AI tools and agents, right? Um, and if so, if you're not augmenting your work with AI right now and you're working within a big company, um, you start— you're going to start to see that the people that are doing that are going to be the ones that get promoted, and the people that don't are going to be the ones that get phased out. All right, so even if you don't go ahead and start a business, please take this as a warning and as an opportunity, right? A risk is an opportunity. The people that are getting ahead of this now, the early adopters, so to speak, are the ones that are going to get rewarded. And, you know, the pace of change on this is so fast that the longer you wait to start using these tools, the more it's going to be harder for you to kind of catch up. Okay. And really as a result of all these tools, and you could probably notice here that this screenshot is from a LinkedIn post or something from a while ago, right? Claude 3.5, it's a much higher number now, right? But even back then, people were saying, look guys, everyone now is a startup founder, right? Everyone can be a programmer, everyone can be a designer, everyone can be a copywriter, right? There is no excuse anymore. Gone are the days where you need to go raise funding to build a big team and then release an MVP in 6 months or whatever. Right. There's no excuses anymore. Bootstrapping is not optional. All right. And this is something in Founder Institute programs, we push all of our founders to bootstrap in the beginning. A lot of our founders raise money and that's great, but we always push them to bootstrap in the beginning because that's how you prove out the business case. Right. When you bootstrap, it gives you optionality. Let's say that you disprove or invalidate the business case. Great. Kill or pivot the idea. All right, if you can figure that out fast, that's great for you. And the best way to learn is to fail fast. Now, if you do prove or validate the business case by bootstrapping, right, now you have optionality. You can continue to bootstrap to profitability, right? You can hire if you want. You don't need to hire. You can build a great business for yourself or however many people that you want, and maybe you never even have to raise funding, right? And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. You know, if you prove and validate the business through bootstrapping, then, you know, you can start to recruit great people with equity-heavy compensation, right? Because you presumably don't have a ton of capital. And now you're actually, since you've proven the business case, you're able to negotiate sort of from a position of strength, right? And say to somebody, let's say that you need to hire a developer or, you know, an engineer or something, you can say, look, look at what I've been able to do with just Why coding a product, right? Imagine I had real tech, right? And those kinds of arguments right now, you can bring people on for equity that are really, really strong onto your team and build out the business to get to the next milestones. Or finally, you know, you can still raise funding. This isn't an, you know, an or kind of equation. You bootstrap or you raise funding, right? Our argument is that you should always bootstrap first and then you can raise funding later. Right? But when you bootstrap first and you prove out the business case, it gives you optionality. And then in this case, if you do raise funding later, right, again, you're raising funding from a position of strength. Most investors don't invest in just rough ideas, right? Investors want to see that you've been able to put a little kindle of a fire together, right? An existing little kindle, a business case, existing traction, existing proof that the market exists for this and that people are willing to pay for it. right? And then they provide money, gasoline, to take the little kindle of a fire that you've already created and then to make it explode and grow really fast into a venture-scale business, right? So again, bootstrapping, it doesn't prevent you from raising funding, you know, it's not optional anymore unless you are a multi-time founder, right, with a great track record and you have investors just willing to write you a blank check because they've seen you be successful before. or if you just have a rich uncle or something, right, who's willing to just write you some money. If you don't have those things, okay, like, like most of us don't, then bootstrapping is not an option, okay? It is mandatory. And I would say also that AI is not an option either. Every single business is an AI business, okay? From, from this date forward, um, it honestly was from many months ago forward, or maybe a year or two ago. Forward. But every business is an AI business, right? It doesn't necessarily mean that you're building literally like an AI product, right? But every, every business is expected to be AI native, right? Either in a product, right? Maybe you literally are creating AI for whatever, right? But no matter what kind of business you're building, if you're building a dog food business, right? I don't care. You need to be using AI in your day-to-day work to be more productive and to do more with less. That is your job as an entrepreneur in the beginning, especially when you're bootstrapping, right? You need to do more with less. That's exactly what AI helps you do, right? Which is why we say now that AI is not optional. You have to be using it to be more productive. So if we look at like what the old way for entrepreneurs was, right? The old way to actually launch a startup, right? Again, you'd recruit a team, you would Yeah, you'd recruit a team, you know, typically hackers, hipsters, hustlers was sort of an old saying for recruiting a team, right? Someone to build, somebody to design and market, and somebody to like raise money and sell. Or you'd hire or pay for additional expertise, right? You'd have to hire a bunch of people or contract lawyers, accountants, et cetera, right? To professionalize earlier, then you'd raise funding to launch, right? You'd raise money from angels about some promise of something that you would do. Right? And then you'd spend 6 months, 12 months, whatever, building out a big MVP, right? And then you validate the business and then try to prove out the business and then raise the seed round after that and go from there, right? The solo founder revolution. Now forget all of that, right? Now you can use AI tools and agents, anybody, right? No specialized skills are needed, right? Just a little bit of diligence and, you know, maybe some domain expertise and whatever business you're trying to build. Or wherever you're trying to build a business, right? You can brainstorm and analyze startup ideas using these AI tools. You can understand, identify and understand your customer problem, right? AKA customer development, right? These tools can help you do it really quickly. You can identify and interview these potential early adopters again using these tools to move quickly. And then you can build an inertial version of your product using live coding tools, get it into the hands of customers and start proving out your business case, right? And once you can prove out your business case, now you have optionality, all right? This is the new way to do it, and it's an amazing opportunity for solo founders, first-time founders, employees, entrepreneurs, you name it, right? It's an amazing opportunity. I'll say especially for employees and entrepreneurs, because that means that you've been working in an industry, you've been working in a business where you understand customer problems within that industry. Better than most, right? And that's where we think there's really going to be a massive explosion of like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of startups, right? Just based on that knowledge that people have within big businesses, right? Some of those people are going to get laid off, and that's going to spur the creation of startups too, right? But also, I think some of them are going to start to see the writing on the wall and understand that their job may be replaced and they're going to start to look at using some of these tools to build their own startup moving forward. Okay, so I'm going to go through these 4 steps here on how AI tools can help you do this, right, and the different steps that solo founders can make. Um, and then after that, we will get into that networking session that I described before. So the first part here is to brainstorm and analyze startup ideas. So Honestly, brainstorming is sort of becoming commoditized now within the startup environment, right? So this is the link that I shared earlier. This was a tool. This tool, by the way, everybody, was vibe-coded, okay? So when we talk about products and stuff, this tool was vibe-coded by a member of our marketing team who's not technical, all right? So again, like, these tools are pretty easy to make, right? So if I put in here, Uh, all right, I'll do Airbnb but for, for, uh, dogs, let's say, right? Again, this is a theoretical idea. You could see here how this tool works. It's pretty cool, at least to help you start. It'll give you a whole bunch of ideas, it'll rank them. Let's say, okay, Airbnb-style marketplace connecting dog owners with verified pet sitters and dog walkers. Okay, um, Dog B&B, right? So it's looking at kind of different different angles around this. Why don't I do maybe this decentralized dog boarding service, right? Peer-to-peer alternative to traditional kennels. Um, I think that's, that's a pretty cool idea. I would use that personally as a dog owner. I don't like bringing my dog to a kennel. It's a rescue, so it gets really nervous. So I'll, I'll pick this one, right? I'd rather leave it with somebody else who, who loves dogs, right? As long as they're kind of, um, vetted in some way and there's some kind of insurance involved, right? So here it'll tell you, okay, here's your idea. Next step, identify your customer, define the problem, start to conduct user interviews. All right. So again, this is the tool that we want you to use during the networking portion of the event here at the end. And again, it's just to kind of get those creative juices flowing. But as you can see here, right, that was a very simple version. You can really go deep on this tool. This is a live coded tool. So again, these early versions of products, can be created very, very quickly, right? Those live coded using Replit, um, but you can use these tools to come up with great startup ideas. The second thing is then, um, developing and refining the startup idea, right? And the tool that we really like to use here is, is Claude. And Claude, you know, if Claude Co-Work has really been a game changer because it now it essentially is allowing anybody, um, non-coders et cetera, to use the agentic power of AI, right, to actually control your computer and do things for you and to set schedules for it to do things for you automatically, et cetera. But Claude skills is also an amazing thing. And the way that I would equate it to is sort of like in The Matrix where it's like, all right, they're uploading skills to Neo's brain, right? And all of a sudden he's like, I know kung fu, right? This is literally what you could use Claude skills for. So we have a little video here too that we'll put in the chat. So this will help you actually go through the process of how to create skills and how to use the skills, right? You're starting to see now that a lot of people are just sharing those skills online. There's a ton— Cloud is releasing their own versions of skills. A couple weeks ago, they released one that basically allowed anybody to become like an amazing financial analyst, like, or like a basically data analyst by looking at spreadsheets and stuff that freaked out a lot of people in Wall Street and in the financial industry, right? 'Cause now literally somebody could just upload a skill and like, I'm an amazing financial analyst, right? And they can start using it, right? This is the power of these tools, all right? And then you have to call upon Claude and they can help you do a couple of things. So here's a skill that we created that you can also download. We'll put this link in the chat as well. And by the way, guys, I'm going to be sharing a lot of prompts, a lot of links and stuff throughout this presentation. You will get a copy of this presentation, okay? So you don't have to go through frantically taking screenshots and stuff right now. You'll get a copy of this presentation in the next day or two. All right, just give us a minute to kind of process the video and everything, and you'll get a copy of the video and the presentation from this event. So you can come back and you can copy and paste all these prompts and URLs if you need to, okay? But here we created the startup idea clarity skill to help you so you can call upon this skill and then you can start sharing its ideas with you and it'll start helping you analyze the idea, basically be like a sparring partner to talk through all of the different components of your startup idea in the same way that maybe a startup mentor might on an initial conversation to help you start to identify the various pain points and exactly where you will focus, uh, solving a problem on this business, and then it'll even give you scores, um, on the idea as well so that you can help improve. So I encourage you to download that skill, upload it, and really just Claude skills in general are an amazing tool, right? I'm sure if you just started searching now, you can start to find skills on everything, um, but that's a skill that we created specifically for startup ideation. So, um, You can also analyze the competitive landscape, right? And this is something that AI tools have been really, really good at even from day one. Even some of the earliest versions of some of these models were pretty strong at just doing analysis, right? Literally, this is replacing— you're seeing a lot of sort of consultants, right? The McKinseys of the world, etc. You know, the big companies used to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to create create some competitive report, right, that McKinsey would then give to like new grads out of Harvard, and they'd spend a month putting together some crazy presentation, right? You don't need that anymore. You can use these tools and it can do it for you, all right? Like literally, I gave a report— I found— I Googled online, I found an old McKinsey report, like a PDF that just happened to be online, right? I gave it to Claude, and then I told it what I wanted to research using this prompt. And it gave me essentially a PowerPoint presentation that looks just like the one that McKinsey probably charged hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for, right? And it got it to me in something like 10 minutes. Okay, like that's how powerful these tools are. So, and that was under— I'm pretty sure I was still using either the $20 a month or the $100 a month subscription, right? It still was able to do that and didn't even come anywhere close to using up my daily tokens or anything like that. So it's pretty amazing. So here's a prompt that you can use to do that research. And again, it's, it's the kind of thing where you can just have it doing tons of different research reports for you and you can become an expert on any industry pretty, pretty quickly. All right, so the second thing that you're going to want to do right after your brainstorming problems, understanding industries, doing market research, right, is really to then start to hone in, identify, and understand a customer problem. Now, good entrepreneurs are obsessed with problems, not ideas and solutions, right? There's a lot of famous quotes you can hear out there, but it really all comes down to is that entrepreneurs sort of always have the customer in mind, right? And if you're really thinking through the lens of the customer, right, customers think in the lens of problems. You don't wake up in the morning and think about all these opportunities, right? We are all human, we all have problems, we all have big task lists, things that worry us, things that give us anxiety, right? If you really want to think through the lens of a customer, you have to speak in the language of problems, not ideas and solutions. So the first simplest way to do this is to define a problem statement, right? So the simplest problem statement is I have a defined audience and they have this specific problem, right? So it's an example, I believe that CSMs, customer success managers, struggle to respond fast enough or provide a timely onboarding call for new customers. Okay, it's a clear definition, right? It's a decent start, but really when you, you need to go a lot deeper than that, right? This is step 1, then you need to start to think through and really analyze again, putting yourself in the shoes of your customer, how they experience the problem, right? In what context do they experience the problem? How do they describe the problem, right? And this is where AI tools can help you as well. So you can use tools like Reddit to really start to identify trends, sentiment, language. People are going on to Reddit and describing these ideas. You'd be, you know, you'd be amazed at how niche Reddit becomes once you start to dig through all the various subreddits. And one of the quick ways so that you don't really need to dig through the subreddits is a new tool that they released not that long ago called Reddit Answers, right? This is essentially a lot of the AI tools right now, guys, ChatGPT, etc. Their initial database was essentially scraped from Reddit, right? Reddit was perfect for the AI. It's people asking questions, people providing answers. It was a perfect breeding ground, right? And they did this to a lot of websites, not just Reddit, but Reddit was one of the main ones. It's essentially like the forum of the internet, right? Before Reddit and a lot of these other publishers caught on, and now they're blocking all of those robots and spiders from stealing their content, right? So Reddit, one of their answers here too was they realized how much of a goldmine their content was for AI. So now they've essentially blocked it off, but they have something called Reddit Answers. So you could use Reddit Answers to really start to dig in. You can get unfiltered opinions from actual users. right? Not just marketing speak, because these are people talking in their own voice, right? You can start to learn their language. This is something that's super important when you're starting to understand your customer and define their problems really well. You have to— if you're not using the same language as them, if you're not using the same terminology as them, like, you might as well be building a different kind of product, right? You're literally— it's going to be like Greek versus English. Nobody's gonna— you could be saying the same exact thing, but it's just not going to be getting growth. So you have to learn their language. You can start to learn about what they generally hate about their existing solutions, right? It's honestly an absolute gold mine when it comes to customer development. And you can ask these types of questions in Reddit answers as well, again, to sort of get you the average of what it's seeing, right? Again, these, these aren't going to be perfect answers, but this is going to help you get sort of directional accuracy, um, on your customer and their problems, where then you can start digging in a little bit more manually right, to really pinpoint exactly what you want to do with the business, you know, and again, you can test your assumptions, you can visit threads, reference in all of the answers, right, and start to dig in. All right, don't expect the AI to just serve everything to you on a platter. You're still gonna have to read through what they're saying, right, the different competitors that they're talking about, the language that they're speaking, the different components of the problems that they have. You're really going to want to dig through all of that within Reddit because you need to understand the full context of the customer, right? It's not just that they have a problem. It's like, in what context? Where do they have this problem? And when in their workflow, in the day, during when they're working on this project or that project, they're trying to hit this KPI or that KPI, right? When and how do they actually encounter this problem? How does it make them feel? Okay. The emotions are a huge part of this game. What is their first step? They have the problem. Now what's the first thing that they do when they try to solve it, right? So what lengths are they going to solve it, all right? And then how would solving it make them feel? What are the, the KPIs and goals that solving it would ultimately help them achieve, right? These are all the things that you really need to dig into. And there's a great tool— I don't remember who created it, but there's a great tool called the Problem Canvas, and you can get the link here, right? And the Problem Canvas really just allows you It kind of just provides a framework so that you could start to think through the lens of the customer, right? So let me give you an example. So that first problem statement that I gave you before, sort of that really simple one, right, was that I believe that customer success managers struggle to respond fast enough or provide an online, you know, timely onboarding call for new customers, right? Now let's see using the canvas how much better we can understand this, right? So you say, okay, what context? Well, several times a day, When a new premium customer, right, now we're really starting to get more specific on the problem. When a more premium customer signs up and expects a personalized onboarding process, right, because they're a premium customer, so they sort of want that white glove service, right? CSMs at small SaaS companies with a global audience, again, getting much more specific, right, than just CSMs, right? So there's all different types of CSMs, all different types of companies. Right? They've struggled to respond fast enough or provide a timely onboarding call, right? So that is the problem we said before, right? What does this cause them? This causes them stress, frustration, and burnout. And not only that, but they're losing premium customers at 25% churn rate a month because they're not able to provide this white glove service that these premium customers expect, right? So what is their alternatives? Well, right now they kind of hack together solutions. They set up an automailer that connects to account only, blah, blah, blah. Right. But again, that's not really the best solution because these short notice calls go late into the night. It's hard on the work-life balance. Right. And still, no matter what they do, they can't provide 24/7 coverage for these calls. So no matter what, the customers are still not going to, you know, we're not going to be serving them exactly how they want to be served. Right. So here you could see the power of this problem canvas is literally just helping you sit there in the eyes of your customer. Okay, so once you identify that problem, you start to dig deep into it. Now you need to define and find your early adopters. Before you need customers, guys, you need early adopters, right? And the early adopter, um, they're— the way that we talk about them with founders in our programs is that you're looking for your hero. Okay, they're sort of like and they're your hero because they need to see you as their savior, right? Because what you're really asking them to do is risk their time, budget, reputation, whatever, on something that doesn't exist, right? They're going to help you define and refine the product, right? If it's a B2B product, especially if you need to kind of like sell up into an organization, they're going to need to like be your internal champion, so to speak, right? So in order for you to realistically expect them to do this for you, you sort of need to be their savior. Right? You need to be the person where when you start talking about the problem to them, they're like, oh my God, finally somebody understands. Finally somebody understands my pain, right? So you need to find those types of people in the beginning. And if you can't find those types of people, then you haven't refined the problem well enough or you're targeting the wrong kind of people. Okay. And our definition for an early adopter is basically somebody that has the problem that you're trying to solve, right? They know they have it. right? This is important. They don't know they have a problem yet, then you're gonna— not saying it's impossible, right? But that just adds extra steps. You're gonna have to educate them, etc., right? Ideally, they have the problem— or sorry, they know they have the problem, right? And if it's through an emotional response, that's even better because that really shows pain, um, that this problem pains them in some way, right? And they're currently paying to solve it in some way, shape, or form. Now, doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, you have a direct competitor and they're paying that direct competitor that would have a very similar offering to you. Right. It could be like before what I was saying, you know, they're hacking together several tools, they're doing it in spreadsheets, they're doing it on a notepad, whatever it is. Right. If they're paying to solve it either through time and/or money, right, then, then you can consider that an early adopter as well. And the biggest piece of advice that I can give here is when you're defining your early adopter, 99% of the time your initial definitions are going to be too broad. Okay. This is one of the powers now too in this AI era and in the solo founder era. Is, you know, I said before, we see a future where there's going to be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of sort of micro startups, right? Because now we're seeing the cost to actually launch a business and build digital products is dropping so fast that it's going to allow people to create kind of really, really, really specialized products for really, really niche audiences, right? So again, you, you want to niche down as much as possible. All right, like envision this, sear this image into your head, right? I promise you that your initial customer definitions are going to be way too broad. You need to niche down. And we have a worksheet here too, which will help you niche down. We're going to turn this worksheet into an AI tool soon too as well. We just haven't been happy with what we've created so far, so we didn't want to share it today with you. But you check out the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will help you niche down. Right, go through a couple of different scenarios and you rank each potential target audience by the emotional need, the utility, right? How profitable could it be if you were to build a business in space? How easy is it for you to reach these customers at scale, right? And it'll try to help you come up with a score to help you think through that initial, you know, target audience. And one thing I'll say here, because this is the biggest pushback I get, right, when I'm pushing founders to slice, slice, specific, specific, specific, niche, niche, niche, right? They all start saying, well, look, I'm an entrepreneur. Aren't I supposed to like think big and try to change the world? And aren't I limiting myself? Aren't I, you know, aren't I thinking too small here? And look, it's not thinking small, it's thinking smart, okay? It's essentially, if we wanna use a military strategy as a reference, right? It's a beachhead strategy. You have to start somewhere. If you try to target too wide of an audience at first, your message isn't gonna be clear, right? You're gonna be kind of competing more along the same playing field with big businesses that have broad products, right? And those big businesses have marketing budgets to push those broad products down people's throats, right? You don't have that. You have to go niche, right? And again, the idea is that you go niche at first, then you expand, right? You come up with that first playbook first, and then I promise you, you'll start to see, oh wow, okay, well there's these other types of customers that also have this problem, right? Now you have those initial playbooks and you go location by location by location, right? It's the same thing in any of the biggest businesses you've seen today, guys. They all started niche at first and then they expanded, okay? So it's not thinking small, it's thinking smart. Then you're gonna wanna find these early adopters, right? 'Cause you need to start talking to them. You need to start again, understanding their problems, start to speak their language. And really the only way to do that effectively at the end of the day is to speak with them. So to find them, right, here's a prompt that we'll give you, right? This is a prompt that will generate a spreadsheet for you, right, to help you actually find these people and start reaching out to them. This is a prompt that you can use in Claude ChatGPT or Gemini. I think, I think with this one in particular, it's really optimized a little bit more for ChatGPT. I still think ChatGPT is the best right now when it comes to like research, whereas Claude is the best when it comes to like writing. Um, and, and Claude Cowork Agentic is just, it's just an incredible game-changing product as well. Um, but I think ChatGPT is really still best, at least at this point in time, right? I might have a different answer next week. Um, it's the best one when it comes to research like that. Uh, then you're going to want to validate through customer interviews, right? So again, you can use some of these tools. Here's another prompt. That you can use to start giving you some potential customers to start, and like a script essentially to start talking to your customers, to start understanding their problems really well so that you could build the perfect solution to solve their problem. Now, a quick warning here, okay? You have to talk to customers. Don't fall into this trap. AI is helpful, okay? But AI will get you to a certain point. You still have to talk to customers, okay? AI will just help you do it more efficient— efficiently. But as an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a perfect solution for a problem for a very specific customer, all right? And you cannot do that by just using AI, all right? AI essentially takes like the average, so to speak, of what all customers are talking about. So inherently, that's more of a mass market thing. And inherently, as a startup, you have to start with a niche. Okay, so that means you are still going to have to talk to customers, right? There's no shortcut around that right now. And if you try to avoid that, you're probably not going to be successful. So please don't rely on AI to replace that part of the customer development process. Just rely on it to help you go through customer development, you know, do the market research, help you get directionally accurate on their language and stuff using Reddit. Help you find these customers a lot faster, help you run the interviews in a way that will give you much more relevant data, right? But you have to do those interviews, you have to talk to customers. And then finally here, right, build your initial product. So Claude is an amazing tool, guys. As I said, it's definitely my go-to right now within all of the AI tools. But what we recommend first is that, you know, let's start talking, using your idea and going into wireframes, right? So you can describe your idea to Claude, it can start to give you visual prototypes. So, you know, here's just like an example of a, of a conversation with Claude, right? It can go through this whole process with you. You can start ideating essentially the basic features of your products. You can then start talking to Claude to turn it into a working prototype, and then you can download that source code that it gives you right, from the wireframe itself. One other thing that I'd mention here to you guys is that it, especially with websites and stuff, we did it where we literally redesigned like a checkout page, right? Not a small inconsequential page, a checkout page on a website is a very important page, right? It's where you actually convert and collect payment. We had Claude redesign a checkout page, or literally we just found a checkout page on the internet that we really liked. We took a screenshot of it, we put it into Claude, right? We told Claude, okay, here's our product, here are our bullet points and stuff, like give us a redesign of this, you know, following our design paradigms, etc. It spit it out. I think I had to maybe go through 1 or 2 more rounds of prompts, right? So this is a total of like 15 minutes of work where then it gave me something that I really liked. I was then able to download that HTML, give it to our designer for final tweaks and stuff, and then we had it deployed within like 24 hours. Right. Something like that would have taken weeks, maybe, of back and forth and back and forth, right? Because it's such an important page. But we were literally able to do it ridiculously fast using these tools. So again, it can help you. You can download the source code and you can use that, right? You can prioritize features. So one of the biggest issues, again, is in the same way where new entrepreneurs, first-time founders, etc., will try to target too wide of an audience, they'll also try to create a product with too many features. Okay, you're really trying to hone in. You're trying to solve one problem for one customer with one killer feature in the beginning. Okay, so there's a tool or there's a framework that's been around for a while called Moscow, which we like to use, right? And it helps you really just prioritize between the most important, you know, should have, could have, or won't have yet, right? And here's a prompt that will help you use that Moscow. Framework to outline some of the initial early versions. Now, when it comes to actually building out the prototype, okay, or building out the MVP or the early version of your product, the first thing that I'll mention here, guys, is that this isn't the final version of your product, okay? If you're a solo founder and you don't have development skills, again, just understand that right now you're in this bootstrapping mode to prove or disprove the business case, right? So in order to do that, you're not trying to create the final version of your product with all these crazy amazing features and all these, you know, nice to haves and stuff. You're creating early versions of the product, and in some cases, what you build using these tools may be throwaway, right? But at least then, like throwaway code, I should say, but at least then you've proven out the business case, and now you can recruit engineers and stuff, right? And you can give them what, you know, what the best spec you could give a developer is, is actually like a live coded product. Like, look, this is how I've actually made it work, right? It's a hell of a lot better than a Word doc that just lists out features, right? Um, now between the different tools that we see, uh, you know, the one that we use the most right now at Founder Institute and a lot of the, the AI boot camps that we run— and you can see all these boot camps at f.co/bootcamps, by the way— uh, is, uh, Replit. Right. Replit is sort of our favorite one, but you do need to kind of mix and match these tools together. So we'll use like Claude or ChatGPT to help create the prompts and the requirements documents and things like that to then give into Replit to actually build, right? It's usually a combination of a lot of different tools. Lovable is one of the fastest growing companies in the world, I believe. And you know, what they've really nailed is being almost like the Squarespace, right? Squarespace is really beginner, like helps anybody get a website up really fast. Lovable is sort of taking that same dynamic with bot coding. So it's really entry level right now. It's getting more powerful, don't get me wrong, but it's pretty entry level. So I have it up here because it can help you get something live fast, right? It's just not necessarily maybe gonna be as powerful or as extensible as something like Replit, right? Then you could see here kind of going down the line, I know there's also the ChatGPT one as well, right? What I would put that down kind of near Claude here, Claude Code, you know, when it comes to actually vibe coding tools. You can then bring these wireframes into Replit, right? So again, you could take the source code from Claude, put it into Replit, and then Replit can begin to bring these products to life for you. And then when you start— want to start adding more features, right? And again, I wouldn't do this at first, but at least, uh, we see, uh, people when they want to start adding more, um, you know, things like security or things like identity, right? Um, you know, pulling in other tools to make your apps more powerful. Uh, that's where things like Supabase and N8N come in, right? Stripe payments are super easy to do using any of these back coding tools. N8N is particularly powerful if anyone's used Zapier in the past, right? N8N is essentially Zapier for the AI age. So it allows you to connect various APIs and kind of create like recipes, so to speak. So you could pull different services together and actually build super, super powerful features using a VibeKota platform. Okay. And again, none of these things, guys, it just— my recommendation here is that none of these things take technical knowledge. Okay. I mean, yes, ideally, you know, you sort of know your way around the internet and you're good at just researching stuff. And, you know, maybe you've used something like Zapier in the past, but again, it's really the kind of thing that you can self-teach yourself. And for anybody that has used these, any of these vibe coding products, I promise you, like, it's— you're gonna rip your hair out a couple times in the beginning. It's going to be a test of will and frustration, but they're getting better, first of all. But second of all, the only way to start learning is just start playing around with them. Okay. You know, there's some videos and stuff you can watch online, maybe to avoid some of the common mistakes. Again, like, we run boot camps that to help you avoid a lot of the common mistakes and to kind of get moving fast. But the faster you start using them, I think the quicker you'll start to get better results, because there's a learning curve, but the best way is just start using, okay? And then you'll start to see how powerful they are pretty quickly. Okay, well, hopefully that was helpful for everybody. Now we're gonna get to the fun part of the event, which is the idea sharing lounge. Again, hopefully you're on a desktop or a tablet using Chrome or Firefox, okay? If you are joining on a mobile device, you may not get the best experience here in this idea sharing lounge. It's just some limitations of this Airmeet platform, which is great, but they haven't really cracked the mobile, the mobile thing yet. So you'll get the most out of this if you do join using one of those methods. Then open up that startup idea engine. Right. And then the idea is, is that you'll go around and share your ideas and hear other people's ideas and provide feedback. As a new entrepreneur, and especially as a solo founder, right, because you're sort of doing this alone, you— feedback for you, whether it's from your peers, experts, mentors, right? And Founder Institute's the world's largest network of startup mentors that we have in our programs to help people. Or most importantly, right, is actual potential customers, right? People that could be early adopters, right? Feedback is one of the greatest things that you can get in the beginning, right? I'd put it a very close second to actually revenue, right, for your business is feedback. You need to be collecting as much feedback as possible. The more feedback you collect, the close— the more data you have, the more you can start to pattern match, the closer you will be to actually building something that is valuable. Okay. And this happens in our Founders 2 programs all the time where we have these things called working groups where founders in the program will talk with each other about the businesses that they're building and they'll pitch each other and they'll get feedback from each other. And a lot of times, especially for new founders coming in, they'll say like, oh, you know, that sounds great and all, but I'm a lot more interested in getting feedback from the mentors. Than I am other people. And we'll say, okay, fair enough, but do not discount that feedback, okay? You need to be getting as much as possible. And who knows, some of those other people may be potential customers, right? They may know potential customers that they can introduce you to. And again, if any feedback is good feedback at this point. So what we recommend now in these tables is that you use the startup idea engine, right, to get instant feedback on your concept. Concept. You then share that idea with others in the audience. Okay. And again, be vulnerable. All feedback is good feedback to start. Don't listen with the intent to argue. Okay. Don't get defensive. Right. Because the more you're talking, the less you're getting feedback. Right. So don't try to turn it into like a debate club or anything like that. Share the idea, get feedback. And the final thing I'd say here, right, and hopefully I don't have to have to say this, but based on some behavior before, I think I do have to say this. Just don't be a jerk. We're all here together, right, to share ideas, to get feedback. So nobody likes a time hog, right? If you, if you're going more to about 3 minutes per person, then maybe let's rotate. Okay, try to keep— don't share your life story about your idea. Just share your idea, what you're thinking about doing, right? And then people can give feedback, right? Try to provide honest feedback but constructive feedback. Don't be a jerk when it comes to feedback either. Right. And again, you know, at this point, all feedback is good feedback, guys. So hopefully, you know, ideally you can get some feedback that could be helpful. You know, I think best case scenario here, maybe you could find, even talk to a potential customer, right? And then maybe speak with them later or something, exchange information using the tools here, you know, the private messaging tools, right, where you can do deeper analysis and a deeper understanding of the problems, right? But yeah, let's make this idea sharing lounge really helpful. And just as a last note from me, if you do have any feedback on these sessions, we run a lot of Founder Institute webinars around the world. You know, we run— I think last year was 991 free startup events worldwide, if I'm not mistaken. So, you know, we try to do these to help the global startup community because we see the opportunity here. We believe that entrepreneurs make the world a better place, but obviously we always want to improve. So if you do have any feedback, please please do leave it in that form and we'll put that into the chat as well. Okay, well, that's all I got, guys. Thank you so much. Enjoy those rooms. All feedback is good feedback. Don't listen with the intent to argue, listen with the intent to learn and understand. And I hope you all have a great rest of the day. Okay, thanks everyone. I hope I'll see you soon. Bye.