If I Were Going to Build and Market an App Using AI, This Is How I Would Do It
I have worked at three Series A startups. One got acquired by LSEG. One does not exist anymore. And one is TBD.
I watched all three of them raise millions of dollars and I saw people younger than I (& with less experience) walk out with checks that most people spend their entire careers trying to earn.
Anyone, literally ANYONE can raise millions and start a company (it's on you, though, to get it to last for more than a year). Today the barrier to entry is so low that you can no longer blame education or capital for not building something of your own.
You do not need a co-founder with an engineering background. You do not need a seed round, and you certainly do not need to wait until you know more, have more, or are more ready to build that "thing" you have been thinking about for years now.
The world rewards audacity, not being right.
And the tools that exist today make the cost of starting a company almost nothing compared to what it used to be.
So if I were building and marketing an app, this is the framework I would follow today ⬇️
1️⃣ Use Claude to pressure-test the idea before you touch anything else
One honest hour with Claude before you build your product, will save you months of building the wrong thing.
The startups I worked at that failed did not fail because the team was not smart enough or because the market was not there. They failed because they fell in love with a solution before they truly understood the problem. They built first and went looking for users after. By the time reality caught up, product market fit was almost impossible to find.
Before I open a single tool, before I write a line of code or generate a screen, I go to Claude and ask it to push back on everything. Not to help me think through my idea but to poke holes in it.
I want to know where I am wrong. What assumptions I am making that could make the whole thing collapse. Who specifically has this problem and how badly. What already exists that solves it and why someone would choose my version instead.
Claude will not soften the feedback if you push it to be direct.
2️⃣ Ship a prototype this week, not this quarter
If your timeline to a working demo is longer than two weeks, your scope is wrong.
Every slow-moving startup I was part of made the same mistake. They wanted the prototype to be perfect. It does not need to be perfect. But it does need to be real enough that, when someone with the problem you are solving looks at it, they either lean in or they do not. That reaction is the data.
Tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit are AI-native and let you go from a description to a working, clickable application in hours (or at most a week). Build exactly two things at this stage: 1) the core interaction that shows the value & a way to collect contact information from people who want access; 2) socials.
Features, branding, polish, everything else comes after you have confirmed that the core thing actually solves something real for someone who is not you. Speed is the signal here.
3️⃣ Create video content and start getting customers
Once you have something worth showing, record it once - then pull everything out of that one piece and repurpose it everywhere. Film the process, share your thoughts, capture the behind-the-scenes, and stretch every recording as far as it'll go. That product demo also becomes a social clip. That webinar can also be chopped into bite-sized TikToks your audience will actually watch.
Video content used to be painful to make, but tools like Descript have changed the game. Descript transcribes your footage the moment you upload it and lets you edit the video by editing the words and prompting the AI. From one edit, you can export a vertical cut for Reels and TikTok, a landscape version for YouTube, and a square version for LinkedIn, all without touching the footage again.
Then drop the transcript into Claude and ask for an Instagram caption, a tweet thread, a newsletter section, a LinkedIn post, and three short-form hooks.
One hour of recording becomes a full week of content across every platform.
4️⃣ Get three people to talk about it who are not you
Find one to three creators who genuinely use your product and will tell their audience about it (you can also ask friends or friends of friends).
The filter is not follower count. It is relevance and trust. Their audience matches your user, they have a pattern of genuinely using what they recommend, and their community believes them. If someone uses your product and it does something real for them, they will talk about it. That authenticity is what makes the recommendation travel in a way that an ad never does.
5️⃣ Push to your warm pipeline before you go cold
Your warmest audience will always outperform a cold one. Before spending a dollar on advertising or a minute on cold outreach, push the product through every warm channel you already have. The people who know you, have opted in to hearing from you, and have some existing trust built up over time.
Here is how to think about each channel at this stage:
- Instagram for building narrative around the problem, not the product. Make people feel something before they ever see a sign-up page.
- TikTok for organic reach through genuine storytelling. A real walkthrough of something you built from scratch still has a chance to travel on TikTok in a way that other platforms have largely stopped rewarding.
- Reddit for the most brutally honest feedback you will ever get. Find the communities where your target user already lives, contribute before you ever mention what you built, and when you do share it, do it as a member of that community solving a shared problem.
- LinkedIn for professional buyers and decision-makers who can move from individual user to team customer.
- Your newsletter and your DMs first, every time. A personal message to fifty people who already trust you will outperform a blast to five thousand who do not know you exist.
The window to start your own company is open. The tools that used to require a full engineering team and six months of runway can be done by one person in a weekend. The people who move will have something to show. The people who wait will have more reasons why the timing was never quite right. The world rewards audacity, not being right. Ship the imperfect version. Let real people tell you what needs to change. Then go again.
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Kristina
