Your startup idea sucks? Finding Startup Ideas in the AI Era

TL;DR

• This is Part 1 of a five-part series exploring startup building in the AI era, following my newsletter on The Death of the Founder Team Trinity.
• In this edition, I explore how to find a startup idea when AI changes everything - from inspiration to validation.
• Ideas aren't found - they're designed through friction-first discovery, purpose-driven framing, and rapid AI-powered iteration.
• Whether you're building a side gig or a B2B spinout, the key is starting with purpose and structuring your process: not waiting for genius.

MIT, 2018 and TEDx

In 2018, I was in Bill Aulet's class at MIT, learning Disciplined Entrepreneurship firsthand (it is a great book for first time founders, check it out). It was methodical and intense, twenty-four steps to a startup, delivered with precision. That same year, I gave a TEDx talk. At minute 12:00, I made a bold prediction: "In the future, you will just have an idea, and the computer will build the business model."

Back then, it felt like a provocation. Today, it feels like reality.

We are entering an era where ideas are no longer static things to be hunted. They are systems to be orchestrated: shaped by friction, fueled by purpose, and accelerated by AI.

Why Friction Still Matters

Every great venture begins with a tension: something slow, clunky, confusing, or simply broken. This tension is what we call a friction and it is still the best place to start a venture. But what's changed is what happens next.

AI lets us move from noticing friction to simulating it, testing responses, and composing real solutions, all before writing a single line of code. You can now prototype in public, generate different variants instantly, and validate reactions from potential users in real time.

This means that the path from "I think this is a problem" to "I'm getting traction" is no longer a long multi months journey. It can happen in a weekend (maybe the one that is coming?!).

Start With Why — Especially Now

But hold your horses. Today's startups often begin as side gigs (and really I believe for most of us they should). Whether you're an MBA student, a product manager inside a company, or someone tinkering with a new idea after your day job, purpose matters more than ever.

Simon Sinek's call to Start With Why is no longer just motivational, it's strategic. Purpose keeps momentum alive when time and resources are scarce. It makes your story believable and clear, and your decisions focused. And if the startup doesn't succeed, you still fulfilled a mission.

This mindset has helped me many times. And by the way, the same logic holds inside existing organizations. Many of the best AI B2B ideas aren't born from market gaps, they're born from internal inefficiencies. A manual approval process. A bottleneck. A workflow that nobody owns. In B2B, the "why" often starts with saving time, reducing risk, or unlocking hidden value.

The Myth of the Big Idea

We still romanticize "startup mythology". The success of an Airbnb, Instagram or eBay (if you still remember). But those stories often skip the early mess, the dead ends, the pivots, the second-order insights.

In reality, great ideas emerge from systems. They start with small frictions, validated quickly, and grown intentionally. In the AI era, the best founders don't wait for a genius to strike. They build a structure with AI that helps the right idea surface faster.

The VAI Lens on Ideation

To make sense of this shift, I revisited five classical books on startup thinking:

• The Mom Test (Fitzpatrick)
• Creative Confidence (Kelley & Kelley)
• Where Good Ideas Come From (Johnson)
• Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Aulet)
• Zero to One (Thiel & Masters)

These works remain powerful. But they emerged in a pre-AI world, one where research was slow, creativity was manual, and testing took weeks. In 2025, we have a new operating system at our fingertips.

That's where the VAI framework comes in. Instead of fixed roles, we look at functional presence:

• The Visionary identifies shifts, sets direction, and frames meaningful problems.
• The AI Architect explores what's possible now with existing AI tools and composes intelligent systems to solve it.
• The Influencer makes the problem (and the solution) matter in the minds of users and buyers.

So how would you do this in practice? To move from idea to insight in the AI era, I use a structured five-step validation framework. Each step is designed to kill weak ideas quickly and double down on strong ones, using AI not just to speed up the process, but to de-risk it.

The figure above visualizes how each step in this framework reduces risk and increases clarity, moving from raw friction to validated opportunity. By combining structured prompts with AI-powered tools, founders can compress the time between idea and insight from months to days.

An important note about B2B

While startup culture often spotlights consumer apps, some of the most scalable and sticky opportunities lie in B2B, especially when AI enables real efficiency gains.

Whether you're replacing spreadsheets, eliminating manual reviews, or automating compliance workflows, the VAI logic applies. But in B2B, the Influencer role often looks different. You don't need a viral post, you need trust with decision-makers. Influence might mean a whitepaper, a conference talk, or a working prototype that cuts costs.

And the B2B market is huge! In fact bigger than the B2C market. According to McKinsey, internal AI deployments could unlock up to €2.7 trillion in productivity gains. And the European B2B software market is projected to grow to €330 billion by 2026.

The beauty? Your startup doesn't need 100,000 users. It might only need five enterprise clients, if you're solving the right problem.

Closing time: Don't Find the Idea. Design the System.

People often think the hardest part of being an entrepreneur is finding the idea. I've watched students chase inspiration, pitch passion projects, and even apologize for not being "creative enough." One student once told me, "I'm sorry, professor, I'm just not creative." (in the end she absolutely was, she just needed a better system.)

But the world has changed. Today, ideas aren't found. They're designed, with structure, speed, and purpose. The best founders don't wait. They test. They let friction guide them, AI support them, and validation determine what gets built. Visionary. AI Architect. Influencer. These aren't departments. They're a mindset, a new literacy for the AI-native founder.

So don't ask, "What's my big idea?" Ask instead: "Where is the friction? Does it matter to me? Can I test it today?"

Because in the age of AI, the future doesn't belong to those with ideas. It belongs to those who turn friction into AI systems fast.