Starting an AI Startup: Guide For Techies

My startup’s main page

Are you interested in starting your own AI startup, or perhaps a startup in general? You can think of this article as a guide for you: I tried to make it as simple as possible. Even if you never had any startup experience, with this article you will be able to create an MVP in no time.

Recently I took part in a big hackathon, organized by soonami.io. This engaging event revolved around a simple yet challenging premise: participants were tasked with creating a startup idea from scratch and making a Pitch Deck, MVP (Minimum Viable Product), business plan, and a lightpaper. The catch? We had a mere 5 days to accomplish this ambitious feat.

In this article, I will take you on a journey through my experience in the hackathon, detailing the challenges I faced and the valuable insights I gained along the way. As you read on, you’ll discover how I came up with my idea for a startup, and converted it to a working MVP, that is a functional website. Not only that, I got 1st place in this hackathon!

I will also share some AI tools and materials that helped me on this way, and may help you too.

1. Finding a good idea for a startup

In the hackathon, we were limited to ideas that should be connected with helping startups on their way. For example, you could create an AI assistant that will help you do a market analysis for a startup.

But how do you find an idea for a startup in general?

The answer is pretty simple: look for problems. What is something that all people do, and you can optimize? What’s something that can make people’s lifes easier?

In my case, I decided to look at steps of starting a startup. They usually look like this:

Startup steps, Image by Author

For me personally, it always felt like there is a gap between making a Pitch Deck and presenting your idea to investors. How do you know that they will like it? How do you make a good, compelling Pitch Deck?

That’s what I decided to focus on. Using recent advances in AI technologies, you can easily create, for example, a “Pitch Rater”. Using LLMs can help you to analyse text in slides, and training a Convolutional Neural Network can help you with rating design of these slides. By combining these steps, you can get a feedback for your Pitch Deck, and advices on how to improve it.

You, too, can come up with an idea in the same way. Identify a problem that aligns with your expertise, conduct some research on it, and remember: this idea should genuinely interest you; otherwise, you may lose motivation.

2. Market analysis

Now that you have an idea for startup, how do you know that it’s good and has potential? There are three main factors that you should take into account when choosing an idea for a startup:

1. What is the field your startup is in?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. Who are your competitors?

Let’s cover every punct. First — what field your startup is in? This may sound like a pretty obvious/useless question, but you can actually gain many insights from it. First of all, depending on the field you can calculate amont of possible users, revenue and competitors. For example, my PitchHelper startup is mainly focused on new founders, who want to get feedbacks for their Pitch Decks. Based on this statistics, there are 5 million new businesses in just 2022. Every one of them needs a Pitch Deck for an investor, so I potentially have at least 5 million users a year. Also, during my quick research I found at least 3 websites that help you to create a Pitch Deck/Presentation.

Second — who is your target audience? Based on this, you can find things to focus on. For example, my target audience are beginner startupers and founders. Therefore, they are probably not that popular, and don’t have connections with “senior” founders. They probably can get feedback for their product only from friends/relatives, who are usually biased and can’t give an actual, constructive feedback and ways to improve. That’s my startup comes into play.

Next, let’s discuss your competitors. This question is relatively simple, yet many novice founders tend to overlook it. It’s common to encounter people who aspire to create the “next TikTok,” “another Google,” or an “innovative and groundbreaking marketplace platform.” However, if there are already hundreds of products similar to yours, can you be certain that your hundred-and-first startup will generate significant revenue?

It’s overall better to start with something simple, easy-to-create and monetize. This way, you will get experience, some money and knowledge for creating your unicorn.

3. Implementation

Now that you have validated your idea, you have to choose your technological stack. I would recommend to go with something that you are familiar with. For example, I had experience with Python, and that’s exactly what I used for my website. Overall, this is technological stack for my startup:

Backend: Flask, gunicorn
AI: EasyOCR, ChatGPT OpenAI API, Pytorch, Tensorflow
Frontend: React, Next.js

It’s always good to define a pipeline for your product. For me, for example, it looks like this:

Backend pipeline, Image by Author

Here are some of the lessons I learnt during my startup creation:

1. Use templates and ready-to-use assets if possible. Of course, it feels better to create everything by yourself, and you will be sure that everything works, but I would recomend to make your work as easy as possible. You don’t need to create fully-polished, perfect product at first. But you do need a working prototype. This way, when you get your first users, you can ask them what they liked, what they didn’t like, and focus on your strong sides.
   I personally used this website template. It saved me a lot of time. When I will be changing the website for commercial use, I will probably rewrite it, but for MVP this template is perfect. And remember, no user will care regarding how you made your product. They want their problem solved, and that’s all.
2. Choose an easy-to-make MVP. If you have hundreds of features in your head already, choose only 1–2 of them. It’s important that you will be able to finish your MVP and show it to someone, rather than creating a multi-feature monster with hundreds of bugs, inaccuracies and bad UI/UX.
3. Focus on UX. The main areas you should concentrate on are the user action’s response, design, and ease of use for your product. This is the critical space where everything needs to be flawless. Recent statistics indicate that 1 in 4 visitors will abandon a site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. Hence, every minor error could potentially lead to a loss of some percentage of your users. And when this percentage includes potential investors, it becomes particularly unfavorable.
4. Assemble a strong team. If there are aspects you prefer not to handle, such as UI design, it’s beneficial to find someone who can take care of it on your behalf. This not only saves you valuable time but also provides the advantage of having others overseeing the development progress. Receiving advice from different perspectives is always valuable and can lead to better outcomes.
   Working with people you trust is crucial. Unfortunately, there are individuals who might abandon you when your startup faces challenges, leading to an even more severe downfall. Seek out those who will support and motivate you during tough times, as giving up is never a favorable option.
5. Attend hackathons, summits, and other events tailored for founders. Participating in such gatherings will enable you to receive valuable feedback to refine your idea, connect with potential team members, and even attract potential investors.

My startup’s Pitch Deck.

Tools to make your life easier

Starting a startup may seem like an overwhelming task with so much work to do. However, fear not, as there are numerous tools available to assist you on your journey. Here are some that I have personally used and found beneficial:

1. Content generation: ChatGPT, DallE, Midjorney. Using LLMs like ChatGPT, you can get a lot of text job done for you, like descriptions, business plans, light papers etc. And illustrations from DallE and Midjourney will help to make this content interesting.
2. Brainstorming: https://www.ahaapple.com/, https://chat.openai.com, https://www.perplexity.ai. With these tools, your search for a good startup idea will be easier.
3. Brand: https://brandsnap.ai. I like this website. It can give you possible brand names by description, and will also help to choose a website domain.
4. Business plan, Lighpaper: https://startup-assistant.vercel.app. Using this website, I have created my business plan and a lightpaper in just 10 minutes. Remember to not to just copy content from there, but also errorproof it a bit.
5. Pitch Deck: https://pitchbob.io, jasper.ai. This list will also have my website at some point. ;)
6. Other: https://topai.tools/filter?t=Startup+tools. There are a lot of good websites and tools to look at.

Conclusion

Building a startup is an attainable goal open to anyone. Drawing from my own experiences, I’ve crafted a simple guide that I believe will be beneficial to developers, data scientists, and other technical individuals eager to embark on this journey. My hope is that this guide proves to be a valuable resource in the exciting world of startups.

And remember: a failed startup is not a failure. It’s a valuable lesson, that will help you to create a better startup on the next try.

If this article reaches some attention and interest, I will continue writing regarding this topic: how did I created the website, what are the next steps in creating a startup and so on.

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References

1. http://pitchhelper-ai.com:3000 — my website, that I have created in 5 days. There are a lot of things to improve.
2. https://soonami.io
3. https://www.commerceinstitute.com/new-businesses-started-every-year/
4. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unicorn.asp