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Category 1: An AI Editor to Build With
The most important tool in your stack, because it removes the biggest barrier — building software without a dev background. Among AI tools for founders, this is usually step one: if you can't code at all, grab an app builder like Lovable. You describe what the app should do in plain sentences, and you get something that actually runs. Often you'll have a clickable first version within days — not a finished product, and it doesn't need to be. It's enough to ask real users one question: do you click this or not? That answer is worth more early on than any extra feature. If you're more technical, Cursor is the standard — a code editor with AI working alongside you.
Only one thing really matters: pick one and stick with it for the first few months. Tool-hopping feels like progress. It isn't.
Category 2: Research and Validation
The step almost everyone skips — and the reason so many people build something the market never wanted. Before you sink weeks into an idea, you should know whether anyone in that niche is already paying, and roughly how much money is moving through it. A pattern that shows up constantly in founder communities: a finished product, clean design, solid tech — but not a single conversation with a paying customer, ever. Months go into building, not a single day into asking whether anyone would actually pay for it.
We run a tool for exactly this: Starte.ai, a trend finder with estimated revenue and traffic data on thousands of micro-SaaS businesses. To be upfront — this is our own product, not a neutral outside tip. We built it because this exact kind of research ate up the most time when we were founding our own company. There are other paths — reading forums, digging through review sites, comparing competitor pricing — they just take a lot more time.
Category 3: Writing and Thinking
For marketing copy, emails, summaries, and as a sparring partner, you need a solid AI chat subscription. Which of the big models you pick comes down to taste — they're closer to each other than the fan debates would have you believe. Pick one, learn its quirks, done. In practice that means: landing page copy, your first cold email to potential customers, summarizing a long user interview, or just asking "is my pricing too complicated?" — one subscription covers all of it.
From experience: AI-written text is raw material, not a finished product — you always need to do the final polish. Especially on your own "About" page or your first investor email, people can tell instantly when AI text hasn't been read over by a human — smooth, but with no edge to it.
Category 4: Images and Ad Creative
Product shots, ad creatives, social graphics: what used to need a designer's budget now takes minutes with image models. This really pays off with ads — you can test many variations without paying for each one individually. That's why we built AI Studio, another one of our own tools; there are several comparable standalone tools out there too. A practical example: instead of launching one ad and hoping, you generate five variants with different backgrounds, color schemes, or product focus, run them in parallel on Meta or Google, and after a few days check which one gets the clicks. That's the core idea behind ad-radar thinking: don't guess — watch what's already working for others, then vary it yourself.
Category 5: Automation
Once you have your first customers, manual work eats your evenings: onboarding emails, invoices, moving data from A to B. Tools like n8n or Make connect your services with a drag-and-drop builder. A typical first automation workflow: a new customer pays via Stripe, which automatically triggers a welcome email, adds them to your customer list, and pings you on Slack — three manual clicks you never have to do again.
My advice: only automate once a task has annoyed you for the third time — before that, it's premature optimization. Similar to Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale": early on, it's worth doing things manually that you'll automate later, because doing them by hand shows you what the customer actually needs before you lock it into a rigid system.
What You Can Skip
- Tool-stacking: Every new subscription feels productive. Measured by actual customers, tool number six almost always adds zero.
- Hoarding lifetime deals: €49 for a tool you never open isn't an investment — it's decoration.
- Waiting for "the one secret tool": It doesn't exist. People making money with AI products use the same tools as everyone else — just more consistently.
The AI Tools for Founders I Actually Recommend
One app builder, one chat subscription, one research tool — all together under €80 a month.
Images and automation come later, once the product is live and paying for itself. The most important rule stays the same across every AI tool for founders: pick the problem first, then the tool. Do it the other way around and it gets expensive — here's exactly how to approach that order. """
Frequently asked
Which AI tool can I use to build an app without coding skills?
With AI app builders like Base44 or Lovable, you describe in plain sentences what the app should do and get a working version back. That's almost always enough for your first prototype.
How much do the AI tools cost to get started?
Budget around €50–80 a month for a solid setup: an app builder, an AI chat subscription, and a research tool. Costs only go up once the product grows — and ideally, by then it's paying for itself.
Are the free versions enough?
For trying things out, yes. For serious building, rarely. The free tiers are deliberately limited. My advice: test for free, then pay for the two tools you actually end up using every day.
Written by
Bohdan BernatekFounder, Starte.ai
Founder of Starte.ai. Built a business to 125,000+ organic leads and seven-figure revenue — and now works with founders personally, deriving a strategy for their own brand from data across thousands of real projects and producing the creatives for it.
