Most "AI startups" I see are just a thin wrapper around someone else's model and someone else's platform. That feels fine right up until the terms change.
Here's the part people skip: if your whole product lives inside another company's ecosystem, you're not really building a business, you're farming a plot of land you don't own. They can raise the rent, close the API, or ship your feature themselves. You did the work, they keep the leverage.
The thing that's actually yours is the wedge knowing a specific market well enough to spot a problem before it's obvious, and owning the relationship with those users. The model underneath gets cheaper and more replaceable every month. The insight doesn't.
That's the part I keep trying to make easier with SoloVault: surfacing early market signals and turning them into concrete things to build, so you point your effort at a real gap instead of a fragile dependency.