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hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Planktonne 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
zero_ 3 minutes ago [-]
this is well said. and to me this is crazy and sad at the same time.
uxhacker 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
weatherlite 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
benfortuna 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
hypfer 9 minutes ago [-]
You seem to be mistaking the "rules" of the ZIRP SV nonsense bubble for the rules of reality.
Understandably so, but still.
bdcravens 4 minutes ago [-]
The same is true of building a startup based on Rails or React.
dmujic 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
thih9 59 minutes ago [-]
We have seen that category in the past, in MLM.
Perhaps now it’s only two levels but still somehow pyramid shaped.
logicchains 43 minutes ago [-]
>nor does it make sense for society to have people founding businesses at a scale comparable with mowing your lawn or doing your taxes
It 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.
perks_12 1 hours ago [-]
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.
e9 1 hours ago [-]
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hansmayer 38 minutes ago [-]
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Oras 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bdcravens 2 minutes ago [-]
> ... 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.
ElProlactin 55 minutes ago [-]
> 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 41 minutes ago [-]
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 38 minutes ago [-]
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 27 minutes ago [-]
“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.
jurgenaut23 37 minutes ago [-]
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 27 minutes ago [-]
> 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 17 minutes ago [-]
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
LtWorf 52 minutes ago [-]
AI generated market research won't necessarily match reality.
nieksand 49 minutes ago [-]
Nor will human generated market research.
ElProlactin 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
dakolli 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
hatefulheart 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
Netcob 47 minutes ago [-]
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)
rienbdj 1 hours ago [-]
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”.
edu 47 minutes ago [-]
Build a $1B startup. Make no mistakes. /s
Lionga 16 minutes ago [-]
"I will send you to jail if you fail" really makes it work all of the time
OtherShrezzing 1 hours ago [-]
>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 20 minutes ago [-]
> your responsibility is to know what's in your codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real users
It 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.
etoxin 1 hours ago [-]
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.
koe123 25 minutes ago [-]
100 PRs a day? I am sure this is hyperbole but otherwise you have a quote for me?
throwaw12 1 hours ago [-]
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 56 minutes ago [-]
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)`
hansmayer 33 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
petterroea 1 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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?
letier 27 minutes ago [-]
My absolute favorite quote:
Loss of objectivity
The 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.
gyosko 50 minutes ago [-]
I'm tired boss.
1 hours ago [-]
OsrsNeedsf2P 2 hours ago [-]
I looked at the PDF and confirm there is nothing of value in there.
beratbozkurt0 23 minutes ago [-]
I wish there was something similar to this, an online marketing model. Indiehackers definitely need it.
kubb 1 hours ago [-]
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.
swiftcoder 3 minutes ago [-]
You know, I've been fairly convinced we could automate CEOs away since... ChatGPT 3.5 or thereabouts?
mentalgear 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jstummbillig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rw2 1 hours ago [-]
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.
25 minutes ago [-]
59nadir 44 minutes ago [-]
Are people upvoting this so more people can laugh at it? This whole post comes off as a parody of what Anthropic would say.
TrackerFF 1 hours ago [-]
What's AI-native these days?
I've noticed that seemingly every single tech company has re-branded themselves as "AI" company. Add a RAG system and you're now AI. Add a AI-chatbot, and you're now AI.
nilirl 26 minutes ago [-]
As someone who uses these tools extensively: they're extremely productive and extremely idiotic.
Detail-oriented work with lots of output that can cover up the noisy bits of thoughtless garbage? Sure, great.
Analysis-oriented work where decisions have consequences over large amounts of resources? Only an idiot would use these tools for that.
Maybe as a conversational note-taker, but anything more and you don't know what you're doing.
Schiendelman 1 hours ago [-]
I think it's easy for those already in the tech industry to pooh-pooh this, as the previous comments on this post have.
Right now, people with ideas prompt their LLM by saying "I know how to make x, how do I turn that into a business?" Anthropic knows that, and releasing a playbook like this is a way to make people who haven't asked that question think to ask it.
For a non-technical person with a small business they don't know how to operationalize, an agentic workflow is a game changer. You might go from only getting 30% of your work time to build and improve your actual product to 50% or 70%.
Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate? Or needing to close your shop for an upcoming holiday, and having Google and Apple Maps and your website all updated to reflect your closed dates cleanly, without having to fight through every UI? An engineer goes "bah", a baker goes "I just got to sleep two more hours".
I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
ElProlactin 54 minutes ago [-]
> I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
When it comes to AI, a lot of them don't want to understand because it threatens their livelihood.
watwut 19 minutes ago [-]
> Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate?
This does not sound like an issue small craft businesses have, but something programmer think is a thing.
arun6582 59 minutes ago [-]
Buying a welding machine doesn’t make you a welder
y-curious 57 minutes ago [-]
Tell that to certain CEOs that realized they can generate slop code and make their SWE teams deal with the tech debt lol
cultofmetatron 1 hours ago [-]
step 1: find a problem people are willing to pay to make go away.
step 2: find a way to solve that problem for less money than they are willing to pay
step 3: AI???
Rebuff5007 1 hours ago [-]
I've been at a few VC / startup events recently and I was stunned to see the number execs frothing at the mouth about finding a 1-person-ai-driven-billion-dollar-startup. This "playbook" is probably not going to help.
dakolli 27 minutes ago [-]
Someone make a guide on how to turn these VCs into marks I can scam with a bullsh*t AI native product.
jdw64 1 hours ago [-]
When I see notes like this, I wonder whether every success story can really be summarized and patternized this way. If you're building an AI based startup, what exactly would be the point of differentiation? That seems to be the difficult part
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.
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.
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.
So access to capital and clients, connections ,that's the last standing moat I think.
Understandably so, but still.
Perhaps now it’s only two levels but still somehow pyramid shaped.
It 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.
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.
Nor did the web, or mobile, or any other innovation. That doesn't mean you can't build your business around an innovation.
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.
I am positive this will settle down at some point, but the difference will always remain about your own abilities, not that of AI.
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.
AI is a tool. A starting point. A feedback mechanism. It's not the end all or be all.
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.
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.
(Technically that also applies to MS Teams, Google and so on and not just AI)
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.
It 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.
Sounds super stable and cool.
"<filename>-05062026_v3 (1).pdf"
So there were 4 iterations on 5th of June alone for this document
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.
Loss of objectivity
The 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.
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.
Who knows, maybe an AI ideated and AI created product will be the best app of 2026.
I've noticed that seemingly every single tech company has re-branded themselves as "AI" company. Add a RAG system and you're now AI. Add a AI-chatbot, and you're now AI.
Detail-oriented work with lots of output that can cover up the noisy bits of thoughtless garbage? Sure, great.
Analysis-oriented work where decisions have consequences over large amounts of resources? Only an idiot would use these tools for that.
Maybe as a conversational note-taker, but anything more and you don't know what you're doing.
Right now, people with ideas prompt their LLM by saying "I know how to make x, how do I turn that into a business?" Anthropic knows that, and releasing a playbook like this is a way to make people who haven't asked that question think to ask it.
For a non-technical person with a small business they don't know how to operationalize, an agentic workflow is a game changer. You might go from only getting 30% of your work time to build and improve your actual product to 50% or 70%.
Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate? Or needing to close your shop for an upcoming holiday, and having Google and Apple Maps and your website all updated to reflect your closed dates cleanly, without having to fight through every UI? An engineer goes "bah", a baker goes "I just got to sleep two more hours".
I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
When it comes to AI, a lot of them don't want to understand because it threatens their livelihood.
This does not sound like an issue small craft businesses have, but something programmer think is a thing.
step 2: find a way to solve that problem for less money than they are willing to pay
step 3: AI???