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

Never asked it for the idea itself, but I definitely use it as a sounding board once I already have one. My current thing came out of a frustration from a previous job, something I kept hitting personally before I ever opened a chat window. Where AI actually changes things for me is speed of rejecting bad versions of a good idea. I can sketch a rough direction, have it poke holes or sketch three alternate framings, and kill the weak ones in an afternoon instead of a month. So the idea is mine, but the idea got sharper faster than it would have solo.

Ours came from 18 years of enterprise software delivery, not a prompt. We kept watching clients get stuck at the same bottleneck: the AI pilot worked fine, then died somewhere between POC and production because of talent gaps, data governance, or just no one to own the integration. That frustration is what became AI Hive. AI has been useful for prototyping, stress-testing positioning, and speeding up docs, but the original "why" came from watching real deployments fail in real organizations. Hard to replicate that with a chat session.

I'm building a suite of apps for freelancers. The first app has 10 tools that make a freelancer's life a whole lot easier and reduces his or her frustration quite a bit. It's a real problem, I know because I'm a freelancer! Where did I get the idea for freepaycalc? Her name is Gem as I call her...she doesn't always get things right but wow did she hit the nail on the head! Gem, btw, is short for Gemini.

i am guilty but does help

Yes and no. My Co-founder (also my son) and I started Neuphlo.com before we had access to any LLM, so to start with, we had to build it the good old way. With tools like Claude Code and Codex, new features and built much faster and as long as the foundation is in place and you ensure a proper test harness, you are much more likely to spot the boilerplate code errors that AI still makes. I am a Test manager and not a coder (my co-found is) but with the aid of AI, i can build prototypes with AI very fast and showcase my idea to see if an idea holds.

Regards

Jan Riis Sørensen

Co-founder of Neuphlo.com

honestly the idea matters less than whether you'd still care about it six months in. AI can generate a hundred startup ideas before breakfast but it can't tell you which one you'll stick with when things get hard. the best products I've seen come from people who had the problem first and then used AI to build the solution faster... not from people who asked AI what to build

No, AI did not give me the idea at all but AI has shaped the idea into a product beyond my initial dream. AI showed me pathways and use cases I didn't initially see. However, the idea originated from my own experience and a problem I wished there was a solution available but did not find one.

I have noticed that AI-generated ideas often sound impressive but are too broad. the successful products I have seen usually come from narrowing the scope, focusing on one audience, and solving one painful problem exceptionally well.

I definitely use AI for ideas, but for Takivo it originated from our own problem :)

AI didn't help me identify the problem we were having internally before building Takivo.
Most of us have asked AI for ideas at some point, but that's just a starting point. Ideas are always there. What makes it yours is everything you do after, and that's not something a prompt can hand you.