Artificial Idea | AI careers · practical prompts · no hype Thursday, September 18, 2025 · Issue #14 · Prompt Tutorial
The founder's toolkit
5 prompts every founder needs (no coding required)
The biggest competitive advantage available to early-stage founders right now is not capital, network, or technical skill. It is the ability to think clearly and move fast. These five prompts operationalise both.
Issue #13 made the case that the professionals navigating the AI transition most effectively are those reading the labour market honestly and acting on what they find, rather than waiting for institutional direction that may not come. Nowhere is that posture more consequential than in early-stage entrepreneurship, where the speed and quality of decision-making is often the primary variable separating ventures that gain traction from those that do not.
Founders have always needed to think like strategists, researchers, marketers, financial analysts, and communicators simultaneously, often within the same working day. The bottleneck has never been the availability of good frameworks. It has been the time and cost required to apply them rigorously to a specific business in a specific context.
AI removes that bottleneck. Not partially. Substantially. A founder who knows how to prompt well has on-demand access to analytical frameworks, strategic challenge, market research synthesis, and communication refinement that would previously have required either significant financial investment in advisors and consultants or the kind of experienced co-founder network that most early-stage founders do not have.
These five prompts are the ones that address the questions founders face most frequently and where the quality of the answer has the highest downstream impact on the business.
Prompt 1: The idea validator
The problem it solves: testing whether a business idea has genuine merit before investing significant time, money, or social capital in it, without the confirmation bias that comes from asking people who care about you.
You are a rigorous, experienced venture analyst who has
evaluated hundreds of early-stage business ideas.
You are direct, you are not trying to be encouraging,
and you have a low tolerance for assumptions presented
as facts.
Here is my business idea: [describe it as completely
and honestly as you can, including the problem you are
solving, your proposed solution, your target customer,
and your initial thinking on the business model]
Please evaluate it across the following dimensions:
1. The strength of the problem: is this a real,
frequent, painful problem for a clearly defined
customer, or is it a problem that exists but
that people tolerate rather than actively seek
to solve?
2. The quality of the solution: does this solution
meaningfully outperform existing alternatives,
including the alternative of doing nothing?
3. The market: is there a large enough concentration
of customers with this problem to build a
substantial business, or is the addressable
market smaller than it initially appears?
4. The assumption most likely to be wrong: what is
the single belief underlying this idea that has
the least evidence behind it and the most
consequence if it turns out to be false?
5. The three questions I should be able to answer
before spending another month on this
Do not soften the critique. A founder who cannot
handle honest evaluation of their idea in a
private conversation will not handle market
feedback well either.
Point four is the one that produces the most value and the most discomfort. Every business idea rests on a set of assumptions, and almost every failed venture can be traced to one assumption that was never seriously tested. Identifying that assumption before committing resources to it is the most valuable analytical work an early-stage founder can do, and it is the work most likely to be skipped in the excitement of early momentum.
Prompt 2: The customer conversation preparer
The problem it solves: conducting customer discovery interviews that produce genuine insight rather than validation, which is what most founders unconsciously seek and what makes customer research useless.
You are an expert in customer discovery methodology,
specifically the approach developed by Rob Fitzpatrick
in The Mom Test: asking questions that cannot be
answered with polite lies.
I am preparing to speak with potential customers
about the following problem and solution: [describe both]
My target customer for this conversation:
[describe their role, context, and what you
currently believe about their situation]
Please prepare:
1. Five questions that will tell me whether this
problem is real and significant in their life,
without revealing my solution or asking them
to evaluate it
2. Three follow-up questions for each of the
five primary questions, to use if the initial
answer is vague or positive in a way that
feels polite rather than genuine
3. The three things I should listen for that
would tell me this problem is not as significant
as I currently believe
4. The single most important thing to avoid saying
in this conversation, and why
Constraints: No questions that can be answered
with yes or no. No questions that reveal my
proposed solution. No questions that ask the
customer to predict their future behaviour.
The constraint against questions that ask customers to predict future behaviour is grounded in decades of consumer research. Human beings are consistently and significantly wrong about what they will do in hypothetical future scenarios. The only reliable data from a customer conversation is what they have already done, how often they have done it, and how much it has cost them in time, money, or frustration. Everything else is speculation presented with misplaced confidence.
Prompt 3: The business model stress-tester
The problem it solves: identifying the structural weaknesses in a business model before they become expensive operational realities, using the kind of adversarial analysis that most founders only encounter when a sophisticated investor asks a question they cannot answer.
You are a senior partner at a venture capital firm
with twenty years of experience identifying why
business models fail. You are about to hear a
pitch and your job is to find the holes.
Here is my business model: [describe your revenue
model, cost structure, customer acquisition approach,
unit economics as you currently understand them,
and any assumptions you are making about growth]
Please identify:
1. The three most significant structural risks
in this model, stated specifically rather than
as general categories of risk
2. The unit economics scenario under which this
business becomes unviable, and how plausible
that scenario is
3. The competitive response most likely to come
from an established player if this business
gains traction, and whether the model is
resilient to it
4. The one question about this model you would
want answered before making an investment
decision, and why that question matters more
than the others
Do not ask me clarifying questions first.
Work with what I have given you and flag
where the gaps in my description are themselves
a signal worth noting.
The instruction not to ask clarifying questions first is deliberate. Gaps in a founder's description of their own business model are diagnostic. A founder who cannot articulate their unit economics clearly when writing them down for a prompt is not ready to defend them in an investor meeting. The prompt surfaces that gap as a finding rather than smoothing over it with follow-up questions.
Prompt 4: The positioning sharpener
The problem it solves: developing a market position that is specific enough to be genuinely differentiated and honest enough to be credible, rather than the generic "better, faster, cheaper" positioning that most early-stage companies default to.
You are a brand strategist who specialises in
helping early-stage companies develop positioning
that is specific, credible, and genuinely
differentiated in a competitive market.
My company: [name and one-sentence description]
My target customer: [specific description]
The problem I solve: [be precise]
My primary competitors or alternatives:
[list what customers would use instead]
What I currently say about ourselves:
[paste your current tagline, homepage copy,
or pitch description]
Please:
1. Identify the positioning territory my
current messaging is claiming and assess
honestly whether that territory is
defensible or already crowded
2. Identify what my current messaging fails
to communicate that my target customer
actually cares about
3. Propose three alternative positioning
directions, each genuinely distinct,
with a one-sentence rationale for each
4. Write a 25-word positioning statement
for the direction you consider strongest,
and explain why you chose it over the others
Constraints: No superlatives. No claims that
every competitor could make equally.
No positioning that requires the customer
to already understand my solution to appreciate
the differentiation.
The constraint against positioning that requires prior understanding of the solution is one of the most commonly violated principles in early-stage marketing. A significant proportion of startup positioning is written by founders who have spent months thinking about their solution and have lost the ability to read their own messaging through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time. This constraint forces the model to evaluate positioning from a cold-read perspective.
Prompt 5: The investor narrative builder
The problem it solves: constructing a fundraising narrative that answers the questions investors are actually asking, rather than the questions founders think they are asking, which are almost always different.
You are an experienced startup advisor who has
helped founders raise from seed through Series B.
You understand what investors are actually
evaluating when they hear a pitch, which is
often different from what the pitch is
explicitly saying.
My business: [full description including problem,
solution, traction to date, team, market size
thinking, and funding ask]
Please structure a narrative arc for a
ten-minute pitch that:
1. Opens with the problem in a way that makes
an investor feel its significance before
hearing the solution
2. Presents the solution in terms of the
insight it is based on, not just what it does
3. Addresses the market size question in a
way that is credible rather than impressive,
since investors discount inflated TAM claims
significantly
4. Handles the "why you" question honestly,
focusing on genuine founder-market fit
rather than generic capability claims
5. Closes with the specific use of funds in
a way that connects directly to the next
meaningful milestone
Flag any section where my description does
not give you enough to build a credible narrative,
because those gaps are the sections an investor
will probe most aggressively.
The instruction to present the solution in terms of the insight it is based on, rather than what it does, reflects one of the most consistent patterns in successful early-stage fundraising. Investors are not primarily evaluating products. They are evaluating whether the founder has identified a genuine insight about the market, the customer, or the technology that others have missed. The product is evidence of the insight. Leading with the insight, rather than the product, changes the quality of the conversation that follows.
How to use this stack
These five prompts are not a substitute for doing the work. They are a way of doing more of the right work faster. The founder who runs the idea validator prompt and gets a list of uncomfortable questions is not done. They are better equipped to go find the answers.
The value compounds when the prompts are used in sequence. Validate the idea. Prepare for customer conversations that test the validation honestly. Stress-test the business model that emerges from what you learn. Sharpen the positioning based on what the customer conversations reveal. Build the investor narrative from the sharpened positioning and validated model.
That sequence, run with intellectual honesty at each stage, is the analytical foundation of a fundable business. It does not require a co-founder with an MBA, a network of advisors, or an accelerator programme. It requires a clear head, honest inputs, and the willingness to hear things you would rather not.
Monday we are examining the dynamic that sits underneath every career conversation we have had in this newsletter so far: what it actually means to work alongside AI rather than for it or against it, and the specific professional behaviours that distinguish the people doing it well from those still figuring out where to stand.
The answer involves less technology than most people expect.
— The Artificial Idea team
