Building Startups in the AI Era

Building a startup from zero to one has never been easier.

If I had to start over today, here's what I'd use to build:

• Claude / Gemini for ideating and writing PRDs • v0 / Lovable for frontend and landing pages
• Cursor + Claude Code for backend, web apps, mobile apps • n8n / Gumloop for marketing automation • Stripe / Paddle for payment processing

That's it. Five tools. Probably $200/month total.

But here's the contrarian take: None of these tools matter if you can't build an audience.

The AI revolution means you can do things that used to require entire teams:

Clone your voice using ElevenLabs. Generate AI avatars using HeyGen. A/B test 100 ad creatives before spending a dollar.

The technical barriers are disappearing. What remains is the hardest part: convincing people to care about what you're building.

We spent months building and improving Langua. But our biggest advantage was the existing audience from our language learning marketplace - they became our beta testers from day one.

Having people who cared about the problem we were solving made all the difference.

Tools get you to market faster. Audience gets you to revenue faster.

The question isn't "What's the best AI tool for X?"

It's "Who are you building for, and where do they spend their time?"

What AI tools am I missing that you'd add to this stack?

Originally posted on LinkedIn on June 17, 2025