Use AI to build ecosystems, not just products

It's time to use AI with more intention 💡

It’s been about 3 years since ChatGPT dropped and created a firestorm of new AI/LLM inspiration and startup ideas. In that time thousands of fly-by-night products and startups have popped up to shill their wrappers over OpenAI to individuals and companies alike, and personally I find this to be an amazing thing (much like the dotcom era), but I also believe many of these companies struggle to actually apply creativity and the human touch to build products and services people actually want to use. This translates into high churn and low customer loyalty in a market where there are thousands of alternative options.

The human element requires individuality 🦚

Something I’m a huge fan of if companies displaying their own or even just the founders individuality. Let’s face it, the AI market is getting saturated. There is an insane amount of AI tools popping up and the better LLM models get, the lower the barrier to entry will be.

This is why to really stand out in this, or any space, a huge key differentiator is individuality and ecosystem-building. A key example of this is the core features I’ve been building into Atelier Logos. For starters, while we still have a blog, I wanted to offer users, subscribers, and clients something different that is catered to their desires.

How we do it here 🏛️

This is how the content curation service with Exa came into being. As Google search becomes more and more unreliable, tools that can surface content directly specific to a individuals interests become extremely useful, and making it part of the core ecosystem and product offering at Atelier Logos was too good to pass up.

Next came the internal support chat, which might seem just like a bootleg version of Intercom at first glance, but has huge internal benefits (And cost savings) for branding and ecosystem by allowing users to chat with my internal support page bi-directionally using Web Push notifications from anywhere. It’s not as feature-rich as Intercom, but it does that job for a fraction of the cost.

Both of these were built 100% with Cursor, and are a huge part of what I mean when I refer to ecosystem-building.

What makes an ecosystem?

In a world where every AI product shills extractive usage based products and pricing models, it’s important to have features or customer processes that set your brand apart from the rest of the rabble.

These kinds of things can be specially crafted partnership portals, custom built onboarding flows, voice AI with tools like VAPI or Pipecat, or anything special you want to provide your users, be it processes or tech stack-based. The core concept is to build with intention, as opposed to just throwing a prompt at Cursor, setting up a paywall, and hoping it sticks. Always remember survivor bias exists, and not every founder is making $35k/mo.

Want to talk about this more?

This is obviously the type of stuff I love helping people with. So if you’d like support on how you can build using LLMs with more intention, schedule a intro call, or create an account and hit me up via chat!