Founders, be honest: are you building an idea AI gave you?

I thought many founders have tired AI for ideas. the real story starts after you pick one and being building.

For me, AI helps shape ideas, but the starting point still has to be real friction.

My current projects come from problems I kept seeing in client work: messy data extraction, repeated scraping workflows, and turning unstructured web/video data into something usable.

AI is useful for brainstorming names, positioning, features, and faster prototypes. But if the original pain is not something I’ve personally seen or understood, I usually don’t trust the idea enough to build it.

Building the platform that I wanted 10 years ago, but making the dream come true using AI :)

AI has never given me the original idea. It helps me explore 20 directions in an hour instead of 2. The ideas still come from founders I talk to, products I use, and problems I keep noticing.

If I would identify (verify the problem) and would be aligned with that, I would build it :)

I think the real question is not “did AI give you the idea?” but “would you still care about this idea after AI stops making it feel exciting?”

AI is great at producing plausible ideas. That is also the problem. It can make almost anything sound like a startup. But it cannot tell you which problem has been quietly annoying you for years, which workflow you have seen break 50 times, or which customer pain you would still be thinking about on a boring Tuesday.

For me, the best use of AI is not invention it is excavation. It helps pull patterns out of things you have already lived through.

That is partly how I think about Vault (https://vault.hyperiux.com). The idea is not “AI gave me a startup.” It is more like, we all have scattered context, notes, decisions, links, ideas and half-formed thoughts sitting everywhere but when it is time to actually build, decide or explain something, that context disappears. Vault is my attempt to make that knowledge actually usable instead of buried.

So my take on this will be AI can hand you sparks, but it's you who has to bring the scar tissue.

The real products ideas are ok only if you tell the AI all about the audience you targeting and the niche. These simple ideas are too broad :)

Personally, I use it for research but the ideas I'm implementing are my own.

For my latest project, AI told me that it's a new product category (not validated) and I tell it that I like to live dangerously 😏

I think it's inversely true, AI can help at it's best when your idea and market is clear. it can help scale us from 0 to many Customers by managing repetitive tasks.

@bickov One prompt ideas never give out anything meaningful.
If its based on research and repeated validations then I have found success for work and personal projects

I practice a framework to validate ideas: PITCH - Problem, Inform, Trace, Capture, Hatch
A five-step method for going from real felt friction to working prototype in one sitting.
The most important step is Trace - where I use skills to do deep research using AI on the problem we aligned on.
It uses RICE to conclude if the opportunity is still valid.