I’m a 24 year old MBA graduate based out of Canada
The AI space is exciting for me. Mainly Gen AI. I’m passionate about business in general too.
But the truth is my tech experience is limited and I have no following/audience.
Tech: I don’t think of this as a limitation because if my project takes off, I can always hire people or find co-founders. And to begin with, I don’t need a fully developed product. A MVP from Bubble will suffice.
No audience: This is what makes me feel let down. I don’t have any sort of audience to launch to. To make it worse, my budget for marketing is roughly $500 USD. It’s not enough to get me sponsorship placement or test ads. Which is why I feel lost when it comes to marketing the project.
I need advice.
I’m willing to put in the time and effort it takes to make this AI SaaS a success. I’ll be working on this full-time starting April.
I’m targeting founders with funding/revenue and business owners (with a professional management in place). After working full-time for a month, I’ll decide whether to continue or not.
What are my best options to gain traction within a month in this competitive space?
If you don’t have tech skills to build it, you’ve got to be able to craft a pitch and communicate it.
I have no idea what “AI Saas” means, but being that broad there would have to be customers of yours here. At least pitch it to the point where we can declare yes or no.
And then go pitch and win your first 50 customers. One by one.
Then go get funding on the back of your 50 letters of intent.
The whole time you should be looking for a technical co-founder, and you should give them 50% of the business (equals). Without them you will have to give away more equity to raise (because you won’t have any product, or revenue), and you will burn more investment building and iterating your product.
Anything less than equal will not work.
You could make convincing arguments about why the work you’ve already done is valuable, and that they’re coming in later so they should only get xx share. But the reality is everything before that point is mostly irrelevant, what will make difference comes next. And for years into the future, if it’s going to be a success.
Because if you don't I have no clue what you are doing. No technical experience, no technical cofounder, sure that you can throw together a no-code PoC to get investors (ok, this part might work for all I know, investors throw money at stupid things all the time), and you want to do it on $500.
Either you have, what you think is, an amazing idea or an incredibly inflated idea of what super powers a MBA gives you, maybe a little of both.
I'm sorry to be harsh but the levels of arrogance/entitlement in this post are off the chart. Also I'll tell you this: an idea is worthless on its own. You have to be able to follow through and that's measured in years not weekends and I find it hard to believe you could do it without any real tech. Then again 90% of the AI stuff posted here is just a thin wrapper around OpenAI's GPT-4 and at least some of those are getting funding so maybe I'm the wrong one.
The post is so vague as to be totally meaningless. In fact this is going to be my poster child for the cluelessness pervading amongst the "AI/ML entrepreneur" folks.
1) Find what people are already paying for (on Fiverr/Upwork) 2) Build a product that solves that problem
Use https://insanelygood.tools/problems for free market research
Understand that the great majority of products you see are not making any money, funded or not, and the reason they are being funded is because rich people play the lottery too.
You need to build something worth showing to people before anyone will invest in you.
Your only option is picking a book to read on how to start a business.
Your school seems to have failed you.
If you’re so sure you only need to do a full month of work to come up with a demo that will convince investors, why aren’t you starting with that? I’m really not sure what you’re expecting to achieve with this post.
For early validation you can email/LinkedIn message 100 people you know, and ask if they've been having the same problem, and what they've tried to do to resolve it.
Do you have a competitive advantage on any dimension?
Take the $500 and buy an existing social media site.
AI isn't magic: it just does things people do, really fast, and at enormous scale. Any "AI SaaS" is really just a productized version of something you can do with your hands—just done 1M times faster by AI.
Find a thing that's being down slowly today. Learn the ins and outs of that workflow. And then plug AI in.
If you're open to it, I'd love to chat. Email me at james@nonerds.com
Best of luck!