Building AI Products for Founders: Lessons from a Live Build

Founders are a brutal audience. They're impatient. They've seen every productivity tool ever launched. They can smell fluff from across the room. And they don't have time to read your onboarding flow.

But they're also the best users you can possibly build for, because if you actually save them time or make them sharper, they'll tell every other founder they know. There is no better distribution channel than a founder who just had a wow moment.

The trap most AI builders fall into is making something generic. A writing tool. A meeting summariser. A chatbot wrapper. Founders already have ten of those. What they don't have is something built specifically for the weird, lumpy, unglamorous parts of their day - the pitch deck that's been sitting in draft for three weeks, the cofounder conversation they keep avoiding, the investor email they don't know how to phrase.

That's the gap. And that's where the Founder Suite lives.

## PitchMaster and the honest feedback problem

The first product in the suite is PitchMaster. The idea is dead simple: you upload your pitch deck and you get the kind of feedback you'd never get from a person.

Not because people are dumb. Because people are polite. When a founder you know shows you their deck, you give them the soft version. You point at slide three and say "maybe tighten the headline." You don't say "your problem statement is generic, your ask is unclear, and slide eight is where investors will start checking their phones."

AI doesn't have that problem. It has no relationship to protect. So if you prompt it well and feed it the right context, it will tell you the truth. That's the entire value proposition.

What I didn't expect was that people started paying for it before I'd even tested the Stripe integration properly. That's a useful signal. When users are pushing money at something half-built, you know you've found a real wound, not a vitamin.

## The real lesson: launch the painkiller, integrate later

Here's the mistake I made with PitchMaster, and it's worth writing down because it will happen to you too if you build fast.

I launched it as a standalone tool because I was excited and it was working. But the rest of the Founder Suite - the platform layer, the unified login, the dashboard that ties everything together - came after. So now I've got a popular product sitting outside the main system, and I have to do a migration to bring it back into the fold.

Ship the painkiller first. Integrate it second. Just don't forget to integrate it.

If I'd waited for the full platform before launching PitchMaster, I'd have lost months of validation and revenue. But because I shipped it standalone, I now have to do extra work to stitch it in. Both things are true. The right answer is ship anyway, and put the integration on the next sprint - not in some vague backlog you'll never visit.

## What I actually built on Saturday's stream

The live session had three parallel tracks running, which is honestly how I work most days now. I had Claude open in a few different windows, each one wired into a different part of my world.

Here's roughly what was happening:

• Track one: A LinkedIn post for Startmate, who are hiring a Content Community Lead. I piped the brief through my LinkedIn hook generator, which pulls from Batko Brain (my structured archive of every public talk, podcast, and private note I've made over the last decade) and spat out five hooks plus four full post drafts in my voice.
• Track two: Asking Claude to audit the entire batko.ai product lineup against my strategy doc and tell me, honestly, what the next move should be. The answer came back fast: Phase A, platform integration. Fix the PitchMaster migration so the profile flow stops breaking. That single fix unblocks everything downstream.
• Track three: Scoping out a question-and-answer feature for an upcoming AI course I'm running in May. Single tier, one-off price, Stripe checkout with auto-enrol. Simple beats clever every time when you're shipping a v1.

None of these are huge tasks on their own. The interesting bit is how cheap it now is to run three different streams of building work in parallel, with AI doing the heavy lifting on each one. A year ago that would have been three different days of work. Now it's a Saturday afternoon while my kid naps.

## The Batko Brain trick (and why context is everything)

If there's one thing I'd tell any founder building AI products into their own workflow, it's this: invest in your context layer before you invest in your prompts.

Batko Brain is just a GitHub repo. It contains my public stuff (blog posts, talks, LinkedIn history, podcast transcripts) and my private stuff (notes, strategy docs, internal voice guides, business rules). Everything is structured and tagged so an AI agent can pull exactly what it needs.

When I ask Claude to write a LinkedIn post, it doesn't just generate generic content. It pulls my actual history with Startmate, my real opinions on community building, my voice quirks, my Australian English defaults. The output sounds like me because it is me, just compressed and rearranged.

The lesson for founders building AI tools is the same. The model isn't the moat. The context you feed it is the moat. Anyone can call the same API. Not everyone has ten years of structured notes about their customers, their industry, their voice, and their opinions.

If you're a founder thinking about building AI into your business, the highest-leverage thing you can do this month isn't pick a model. It's start building your own brain. A folder. A repo. A Notion. Anywhere you can put structured context that an AI can reach into later.

## What's next for the Founder Suite

The rough plan from here, in order:

• Finish the PitchMaster integration so it lives inside the main platform and shares the same user profile as everything else.
• Ship the AI course in May, with Stripe checkout, auto-enrol, and an in-platform Q&A feature so students can ask anything during the run.
• Add the next product to the suite - probably the positioning tool, because that's the second most common painkiller founders ask me for after pitch feedback.
• Run Build Hour from other offices. Notion has already put their hand up to host one. If you want me to livestream from your office on a Friday at 3pm and let your team grill me with questions, hit me up.

I'm not trying to build the next OpenAI. I'm trying to build the specific tools that specific founders need at specific moments in their journey, and string them together into one place where the same login and the same context flows through everything.

That's a much smaller, much more interesting bet than "AI for everyone." And it's a bet I think a lot more solo builders should be making, because the big AI companies are never going to ship the unsexy, founder-shaped tools we actually need.