Founder Ashutosh Garg says understanding your audience is key to identifying their desires or pain points.
This is a continuous process too- you need to monitor user feedback and iterate rapidly, he continues.
AI can also accelerate this process by analyzing vast amounts of data to uncover trends and predict user behavior. This advice is crucial for founders as it emphasizes building solutions with real market demand. Additional tips include engaging directly with customers, running lean experiments, and staying agile to adapt quickly to feedback.
Founder Ronald Osborne says it is vital not to assume you know what your target audience wants.
You have to validate your idea early and often by speaking with them.
AI can absolutely accelerate this process by analyzing large sets of customer data, identifying trends, and even predicting market shifts. This Y Combinator advice is fundamental for founders, as building without market fit is a fast track to failure. My additional tip: focus on solving a painful problem, not just creating a ‘cool’ product. That’s where true demand lies.
Is Making Something That People Want Enough Today?
Avichal Garg says that picking up a problem and solving it well is not enough to build a world-changing company.
Here’s what he advises people to focus on:
Most people take “Build something people want” to mean “Pick a problem to solve and solve it well.” The world is full of smart people who have the same idea. At least five of them have already tried to solve the problem you’re trying to solve.
Why now?” is the question entrepreneurs really need to answer. “Why now” encompasses two important and closely related concepts:
Why have previous attempts at this idea failed?
What enabling factors have emerged that enable you to succeed today?
Here, Lee Robinson explains a quick technical method for creating an AI application in only 5 minutes.
This one leverages OpenAI’s capabilities to build a personal chatbot.
Let’s build an AI application in 5 minutes with Next.js and Brell. All we need are some AI tools that are going to help us scaffold our UI very quickly. We’re going to use MPX to run this and copy-paste this code locally based on that specific ID for the generation. We want to return the chat component here, not the component EVals. We’ve got our server code with the LLM’s API, but now let’s hook up the front end to actually do the chatting. Now I’ve already added an environment variable to hook up to OpenAI so that I can use my own token. As you can see we have pretty built our own chatbot that we can now extend and add a bunch more things in here if we wanted to.
LLMs like Claude can also run codes to create React Apps from their prompts.
Here’s Professor Ethan Mollick talking about how AI can help you become more creative when searching for new ideas.
One of the most important things you can do to change your perspective is to actually observe the world and see if you can learn anything new or surprising. While nothing beats a real human, an AI interview can be surprisingly enlightening first step. You just need to make it “act” the part. This can involve asking it to “imagine you are a ____, how would you answer” or to ask it to “describe how ___” might answer a question. It may involve a bit of experimentation, but the results can be interesting.
When we cater to peoples’ wants, there is also a question of ethics that pops up. Do people always want something that’s good?
Vices like greed and gluttony, says Randy Brown, do technically fit under the description of what people want.
Yet it is up to us to make sure we don’t exploit this and create something beneficial.
A person brought up with the value of trying to please others could mistakenly believe “make something people want” is inherently good. But focusing just on what people want is short-sighted if it causes problems for others. Many people create lucrative yet destructive products in the name of single-minded focus of creating something for the market. I think until recently the tech industry has under-considered this issue. We now know that if people want to read shocking clickbait, regardless of validity, it can cause real damage to an educated electorate.
AI is a catalyst for these kinds of low-quality mass media products that generate views, which are visible on all major social media platforms.
Here’s Paul Graham, Founder of Y Combinator, detailing why being good helps you as a company.
One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?
Here’s the answer: Do whatever’s best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do. Another advantage of being good is that it makes other people want to help you. This too seems to be an inborn trait in humans.
Solving a real problem is a cliched but also time-tested advice that works, says Armin Ebrahimi, CEO.
Once you’ve done that, you then need to find the best tools to create your solution. AI is one of those tools that, where appropriate, can help make better products by either accelerating the rate and quality of development or offering an improved solution. Being imaginative is key.
Here is Jared Heyman giving his insight on what the most important areas to gauge AI startups are, and why they are important:
As with any other technology vertical, the most important things for investors to look at with AI startups are team, product, market, traction, timing, and defensibility — and those who get carried away with heat or FOMO will quickly lose their shirts.
It’s no secret that Sam Altman was formerly president of Y Combinator, so OpenAI and YC have a special relationship. But whether OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or others build the dominant AI platforms, it’s startups who will build the products and user interfaces that bring the power of these platforms to the masses.
Dalton Caldwell, Managing Director at Y Combinator, has this advice to share with new entrepreneurs:
New technologies bring new opportunities. Whether it’s building websites during the internet boom, flipping goods on eBay, or leveraging AI today, those who understand and act on these tools early can create immense value. The ambitious who seize these moments can control their destiny, bypass traditional career paths, and succeed at any scale—from paying rent to building billion-dollar companies. The key? Don’t just think—act.
In this article, we have seen different methods and ideas for creating with AI and the ethics of doing so.
Solving a real problem and aligning the product with the target audience’s actual demands always increases the likelihood of success, but it is also important to just start somewhere and begin doing things.
We wish you the best on your product journey, and if you liked our article please do subscribe for more insights!
About the author
Chintan Zalani
I'm the insight architect behind Bot Memo. I have spent the last decade building media assets on the internet. Bot Memo started as a simple project covering industry deep dives. Then I built a data pipeline for it. And now I love analyzing and covering all things AI startups and trends on top of our own data infrastructure.
