Inside the Pod: From Idea to Startup in Minutes With AI

Thank you to everyone who is watching or listening to my podcast, AI & I. If you want to see a collection of all of the prompts and responses in one place, Every contributor Rhea Purohit is breaking them down for you to replicate. Let us know what else you’d like to see in these guides. —Dan Shipper

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I stared at a blinking cursor, drank a cup of coffee, obsessively played the same song on repeat—but the inspiration would not come.

Going from zero to one is hard.

I imagine founders face a similar problem when turning their ideas into businesses.

Nicholas Thorne is building a solution to this problem: Audos, an AI chatbot that can take you from startup idea to pitch deck, functional website, custom GPT, and interviews with users in just a few minutes.

Thorne is a general partner at incubator Prehype, which has launched successful venture-backed startups like Barkbox and Ro Health. At Prehype, Thorne works closely with entrepreneurs who are starting new companies—and now he’s using AI to scale the process.

In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper interviewed Thorne about how he built, and now runs, Audos using ChatGPT. Thorne gives an inside look at how Audos uses AI for: 

• Marketing
• Product management
• Sales 
• Operations 

He also uses ChatGPT to prototype new features for Audos live on the show. 

I think this conversation will be useful for anyone who has ever toyed with the idea of starting a business, and is interested in how to do it with AI. This piece goes into the details of how Thorne used ChatGPT to build and operate Audos, complete with screenshots.

Thorne believes that it’s important for a founder to deeply imagine the customer they aim to serve. Audos’s chatbot prompts the user to do this by asking them to name their potential customer.

In the pursuit of finding “founder-customer fit,” the Audos bot directs the user to articulate the problem that the customer is struggling with. It also presents the user with different interpretations of the problem statement with the intent of defining the issue as precisely as possible.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to learn about how Audos:

• Guides users through defining their potential customer, articulating the problem, and generating solutions
• Uses different AI models for marketing, product management, sales, and operations
• Creates branding elements like product name, logo, and marketing positioning tailored to the target audience
• Anticipates and visualizes customer journeys through the product
• Researches potential market size and creates a monetization strategy
• Generates a website, registers a domain, and builds a custom GPT for customer acquisition
• Synthesizes customer interview data into a product roadmap with key features