Monologue's developer treats AI tools like Claude Code and GPT-5 as his engineering team. He credits GPT-5's ability to navigate poorly documented, legacy Mac code from the 1980s as a "biggest unlock," enabling him to build a production-grade app without hiring specialist developers.

A company with modest growth experimented with niche content for a small user segment, revealing a massive, underserved market. This led to a second, separate app that quickly surpassed the original product's revenue and drove hyper-growth, challenging the "focus on one thing" dogma.

To gain a macro perspective, Melanie Perkins does an "AI walk." She goes for a walk and dictates all her thoughts on her phone using a notes app. Later, she uses AI to summarize the brain dump, helping her filter ideas, identify action items, and think more strategically.

Tim McLear used AI coding assistants to build custom apps for niche workflows, like partial document transcription and field research photo logging. He emphasizes that "no one was going to make me this app." The ability for non-specialists to quickly create such hyper-specific internal tools is a key, empowering benefit of AI-assisted development.

Monologue's creator received an immediate, unfiltered feedback loop from his team at the Every incubator, exemplified by a colleague's bug report: "immediate churn." This concentrated, high-quality user base allowed him to rapidly build a bulletproof product, an advantage unavailable to most solo founders.

Monologue's success, built by a single developer with less than $20,000 invested, highlights how AI tools have reset the startup playing field. This lean approach enabled rapid development and achieved product-market fit where heavily funded competitors have struggled, proving capital is no longer the primary moat.

After building an email tool for six months that he never released, Monologue's founder overcorrected by shipping multiple small apps without a cohesive strategy. This demonstrates a common founder learning cycle: oscillating between perfectionism and unfocused, rapid-fire execution.

The surprising success of Dia's custom "Skills" feature revealed a huge user demand for personalized tools. This suggests a key value of AI is enabling non-technical users to build "handmade software" for their specific, just-in-time needs, moving beyond one-size-fits-all applications.

The GM of Spiral felt demotivated and his product stagnated because he didn't personally use it or believe in its vision. The breakthrough came when he pivoted to solve a problem he genuinely cared about—making AI a tool for better thinking, not just faster content production.