Directory / By profession / Founders and startups
Best AI tools for founders and startups
Before the first hires, a founder does every job at once: the landing page, the prototype, the investor deck, the market research, the customer calls. AI gets each of those to good enough quickly, which at this stage matters more than getting any one of them perfect.
- 01 A working MVP without an engineer: Lovable
- 02 A landing page for almost nothing: Carrd
- 03 Market and competitor research: Perplexity
- 04 Investor decks with view tracking: Pitch
- 05 Specifying the product before a designer: Visily
- 06 Notes from customer calls: Granola
A working MVP without an engineer
Lovable
Free · from $25/mo
Turns a plain-English description into a full-stack React and Supabase app with auth, database and hosting wired up, and exports the code to GitHub when you outgrow it. The free tier is 5 build credits a day capped at 30 a month; paid is about $25/mo. Have the architecture reviewed before real users depend on it.
- Free tier
- 5 build credits/day, capped at 30/month
A landing page for almost nothing
Carrd
Free · from $9/year
A custom-domain one-pager costs $19 a year on Pro Standard, per year rather than per month. It has no AI and no database by design, which is the right amount of website for testing demand.
- Free tier
- 3 sites, carrd.co subdomain, Carrd branding
Market and competitor research
Perplexity
Free · Pro from $20/mo
Answers with numbered citations you can check, and pulls live prices when comparing products. The free tier allows roughly 3 Pro Searches a day; Pro is $20/mo. It will not reason over your own private documents.
- Free tier
- Limited daily searches (roughly 3 Pro Searches/day plus a small number of Deep Research queries), basic model access, capped file uploads (~40MB per file, 30-day retention)
Investor decks with view tracking
Pitch
Free · from €10/mo (billed yearly)
Generates a deck from a prompt, lets co-founders edit it together, and share links show who opened it and which slide they stopped on. The free plan gives 100 one-time AI credits and unlimited presentations; paid is €10/mo billed yearly.
- Free tier
- Yes, forever free: 100 one-time AI credits, unlimited presentations
Specifying the product before a designer
Visily
Free · from $11/editor/mo
Feed it a screenshot, a sketch and a paragraph and get editable screens back, then export React, Vue or HTML for an engineer. The free plan has 300 AI credits a month with watermarked exports; paid is $11/editor/mo billed annually.
- Free tier
- 300 AI credits/mo, 2 editable boards, 2,500 elements per board, watermarked exports
Notes from customer calls
Granola
Free (Basic) · Business from $14/user/mo
Enhances your own rough notes with what was said, and no bot joins the call, which matters in early customer conversations. The Basic plan is free; Business is $14/user/mo for unlimited history and integrations.
- Free tier
- Basic, $0/user/month: AI meeting notes, AI chat, shared folders, templates, multi-language support; meeting-history access is described as 'limited' with no numeric cap published
What you can skip
Ahrefs starts at $129/mo for the most complete backlink index there is, which is data a pre-launch startup does not yet have a use for. Ahrefs profile.
Other professions
Some outbound links are affiliate links, marked sponsored. Several tools on this page pay us nothing. Affiliate status never decides what is picked or the order it appears in.