AI for Founders with Ryan Estes Everyone is building AI wrong
The best AI companies won't use LLMs. Here's why most founders are building the wrong thing...
Everyone's chasing ChatGPT wrappers while the real money is buried inside boring businesses making $100M a year. Cabinet factories. Paint mixers. Ball-bearing manufacturers. They're sitting on decades of proprietary data, proprietary SOPs, chemical formulas, machine configurations, and nobody's talking to them because software engineers and cattle ranchers don't hang out at the same bars.
The kids at Stanford and MIT are building for space and quantum computing while ignoring AI for actual industries. There's a class divide keeping founders away from the unglamorous problems that print money. Meanwhile, these factory owners would love to partner, you just have to show up, tour the facility, and actually talk to the people doing the work.
Here's the play: Find a lower-middle-market company with unglamorous IP. Tour their factory. Don't waste time with the sales team, talk to the guy making $20/hour who actually runs the machines and fixes things when they break. That's where the real value lives. Give key partners early equity tied to sales milestones. Build ONE hyper-specific feature—so niche you can describe it in five words or less. Then sell one enterprise license for $83K/month. That's $1M ARR from literally four lines of code packaged as an executable.
Before you even start, check three boxes: Do you have distribution on your cap table? Do you have defensible IP? Do you have an industry expert involved? If you can't check all three, don't build it.
So ask yourself: Are you building a company, or are you just building your ego? Because the real arbitrage isn't in the technology, it's in the relationships nobody else is making.
That's from Josh Furstoss, exited founder, CEO advisor, and the guy who launched four companies last year by finding moats where nobody's looking.
This interview is for founders who want to escape the AI hype cycle, find distribution on their cap table, and build zero-to-one products that actually sell.
Ready to build differently? Head to aiforfounders.co for frameworks that 27,000 AI founders use to validate their next move. Every week. Zero fluff. Just builders building.
Drop a review if this made you rethink your whole strategy.
This show runs on Kitcaster, the podcasting platform that makes you sound professional without the headache. Record, edit, and distribute from one dashboard. Start free at kitcaster.com.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-furstoss/
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org
https://kitcaster.com/application