Counterintuitive Startups in the Age of AI Agents
Counterintuitive Startups in the Age of AI Agents
Do not die.
You can have powerful tools and still fail for boring reasons.
The answer has not changed: notice pain, move fast, talk to users, do not die.
Ideas Come from Noticing, Not Thinking
You do not brainstorm good startup ideas.
You notice them.
Good ideas hide behind problems you find intolerable.
The failure mode is familiar: sit down, invent a plausible concept, and discover nobody cares.
The move is to solve a painful problem you can see.
Lean into schleps, the boring work others avoid.
Start with a small group that desperately needs what you are building.
Dig one deep well, not ten shallow holes.
Ship Embarrassingly Early
Your instincts are wrong in live fire.
The moves feel wrong:
- Launch v1 early enough to be embarrassed.
- Make users happy, not impressed.
- Do unscalable work manually first.
- Do not optimize for looking legit. Office, PR, deck: distraction.
- Fear internal collapse more than competitors.
When capital tightens, easy mode dies. What remains: talk to users, ship, iterate, do not die.
AI makes the first version faster.
It does not make the users optional.
Your One-Liner is an X-Ray
If you cannot describe what you do in one plain sentence, you probably do not know the user or the problem.
Jargon is a red flag.
We help tour guides stop drowning in paperwork.
That beats:
Field service management platform for tour operators.
Start with the user's miserable spreadsheet or WhatsApp thread. Pick a tiny, desperate niche. Do it manually first.
AI Doesn't Change the Rules
Tools are more powerful now, so discipline matters more.
Build small skills, not giant "do everything" agents. Without evals, you are guessing.
But startup rules stayed the same: move fast, find users, talk to them, and make them love the product.
What Matters Now
- Start from pain, not imagination.
- Pick a narrow niche.
- Do it manually. You are the agent for the first 10 users.
- Launch fast. Embarrassing beats invisible.
- One-liner clarity. Fuzzy sentence means fuzzy thinking.
- Do not do other things. "But we're still working on it" = you quit.
- Bad things are coming. Expect punches. Do not give up.
Make something a specific group desperately wants, then survive long enough to serve them.