Founders ship faster with AI. Here’s the stack we recommend.
Technical founders: Cursor is the AI IDE we recommend. Non-technical founders: Lovable lets you ship full-stack apps by chatting.
Use ChatGPT and Claude as your dual co-founders for strategy, copy, and sanity checks.
Gamma turns your raw thoughts into a beautiful investor deck in 20 minutes.
HeyGen lets you ship landing-page hero videos without a camera. Translate to 50 languages.
Canva Pro at $13/month covers your social, ads, and decks until you can afford a designer.
Fathom joins every call and produces shareable notes. Free.
Perplexity Pro is your competitive intelligence team.
Grammarly catches every typo in investor emails.
FAQs
Cursor for engineering teams, Lovable for non-engineer founders, plus ChatGPT and Claude as your operating system.
$50–$150 per founder per month is the sweet spot for 2025. Pays for itself in days.
Tools mentioned in this article
The AI code editor most engineers swear by.
Cursor is a VS Code fork with AI deeply integrated — autocomplete, chat, agent mode, codebase-aware edits. Used by engineers at OpenAI, Shopify, and Stripe.
Build full-stack apps by chatting with AI.
Lovable lets non-developers build full-stack apps just by describing them. Connects to Supabase, GitHub, and Vercel.
The original AI assistant from OpenAI.
ChatGPT is the world's most popular AI assistant. Powered by GPT-4o and GPT-5, it writes, codes, analyzes, and reasons across text, images, and voice. Ideal for everyone from students to enterprises.
Anthropic's thoughtful AI — best for long writing and reasoning.
Claude by Anthropic is known for long, nuanced writing, careful reasoning, and a 200K-token context window. Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads many coding benchmarks.
AI-generated presentations, docs, and webpages.
Gamma turns a prompt into a beautiful presentation, doc, or webpage in seconds. Best AI slide tool, full stop.