While building a legal AI tool, the founders discovered that optimizing each component was a complex benchmarking challenge involving trade-offs between accuracy, speed, and cost. They built an internal tool that quickly gained public traction as the number of models exploded.

Assembled knew they had a real business when they discovered that Stripe, Casper, and Grammarly—all unaware of each other's efforts—had independently built the same color-coded spreadsheet to solve workforce management. This pattern of convergent, homegrown solutions signals a powerful, unmet market need.

AI chatbot company Lyser demonstrated its product's value by using it to run its entire fundraising process. The tool found investors, created the pitch deck, and answered due diligence questions via a chatbot on their website, effectively automating their own fundraise.

Within a large corporation, an intrapreneur's success hinges on validating their idea with potential clients. Since internal investment is a zero-sum game, demonstrating market knowledge and a clear path to customer validation is crucial for convincing leadership to fund your project over competing priorities.

Adam Fodd started experimenting with LLMs to improve his UX agency's efficiency. This internal R&D directly led to the creation of UX Pilot, starting with a Figma plugin and evolving into a full SaaS business, demonstrating a viable path from service to product.

Initially building a tool for ML teams, they discovered the true pain point was creating AI-powered workflows for business users. This insight came from observing how first customers struggled with the infrastructure *around* their tool, not the tool itself.

Early versions of AI-driven products often rely heavily on human intervention. The founder sold an AI solution, but in the beginning, his entire 15-person team manually processed videos behind the scenes, acting as the "AI" to deliver results to the first customer.

Crisp.ai's founder advocates for selling a product before it's built. His team secured over $100,000 from 30 customers using only a Figma sketch. This approach provides the strongest form of market validation, proving customer demand and significantly strengthening a startup's position when fundraising with VCs.

The company originated not as a grand vision, but as a practical tool the founders built for themselves while developing a legal AI assistant. They needed a way to benchmark LLMs for their own use case, and the project grew from there into a full-fledged company.