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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I created an AI board of directors for founders

Most of us founders won’t publicly admit it: We’re very lonely and stressed. I know from 20 years of building 4 companies (1 failure, 3 acquisitions). We can’t be truly transparent with our team, board, investors, twitter, family or friends. We want to, but can’t. No matter what we’re thinking or feeling, we have to project strength. During my entrepreneurial journey I longed for a group of always-available experts that met these criteria: 1. Experienced 2. Trustworthy 3. Kind yet extremely direct 4. Available and affordable Obviously now with LLMs like gpt-4-1106-preview, we’re unlocking…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I created an AI board of directors for founders launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Robots, viral adoption, & the future of enterprise startups

    2015 · box.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Inspiring Entrepreneurs

    2015 · foundersgyan.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Practical advice for founders that feel like fraudsters.

    2016 · thestartupchat.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4IB

    Hey, just wanted to share with you guys and app that I built and deployed in a day with Lovable. So, as a founder I always wanted to have an advisor but my budget would always be less, then on the other hand hand I had Paul's essays on Startup Advice, which I never read because I was busy building stuff. Hence, I built this product which comes into a sweet spot of both at the same time being more reasonable and capable than the alternative. ps: it's running on a reasoning model and tbh I've been able to gather pretty good insights from it. Note to PG: If you're seeing this. I'm your big fan.…

    2025 · paulgraham.resurrect.space · its alternatives →

  5. 5IE

    Hi HN! I spent the last year traveling and feeling purposeless after shutting down my last startup (Zage YC S’21) in Dec 2022. There were some obstacles I couldn’t overcome and decided to return investors 50% of their capital. To afford (and justify to myself) traveling, I started consulting as an engineer and product designer. I started (https://backspace.nyc) and it was a good time. I (and some friends) built a handful of AI experiences and learned a lot along the way. The hardest thing about running a services business shipping and selling AI experiences powered by LLMs was…

    2024 · loom.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…

    Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz · its alternatives →

  7. 7IW

    I'm an ML engineer. I know how AI works, the limitations, the hype. And I was still drowning. Couldn't stick to goals. Couldn't stay consistent. Productivity apps became digital clutter. Therapy waitlists were 3 months out. Friends were tired of my complaints. So at 2am I started building: zropi.com What shocked me was it actually worked. It felt human. Last week I mentioned a tough client call. Didn't set a reminder. Two days later it voice messaged me: "Hey, how'd that call go? You seemed stressed." When does technology ever do that? What makes it feel alive: It doesn't reply instantly.…

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hey HN, I’m 14 and I’ve been obsessed with startups for a while. I noticed one big problem: most of us (especially first-time founders) waste months building something that nobody wants. So I built Startup Solve — an AI-powered platform that helps you stress-test your startup ideas before you write a single line of code. It includes six tools: ~ AI Co-Founder → brainstorms with you like a smart partner. ~ Startup Oracle → pressure-tests your idea and asks the brutal questions VCs would. ~ Funding Predictor → gives an estimate of whether your idea could raise funding. ~ Idea Incubator → helps…

    2025 · startup-solve.lovable.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9IM

    Hey HN, I'm Aydin, a 13-year-old developer and indie maker looking to improve the world with my small startups. Recently, I built 2 micro SaaS projects. I spent days & weeks coding features, always telling myself that after coding one more feature I was for sure to get traction. This never happened. The reason: I never launched. With IndieReq, you can launch your startup fast and get real user feedback so you know exactly what features to ship and improve. All you have to do is sign up for free, create a feedback board, and share the public link with your users. It's that easy! If you've…

    2025 · indiereq.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10IS

    I'm tired of seeing founders building stuff for months and years that nobody would ever pay for. They just don't see it, like most other founders learn to do. Business validation = making money, and nothing else really. If you really wanna make money this year, I can help you do it.

    2025 · validatedsaas.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11IV

    Hey my name is Ivo and I'm a developer and a startup entusiast. My girlfriend was out of the coutry for the weekend and I decided to do something cool like building a startup. I've done a few startups over the years but that's the first I actually released, I would love to hear your feedback on it.

    2024 · craftlynow.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13IM

    Hey HN, I’m Chris, a solo dev in Melbourne AU. For the past month I've been spending my after work hours building AgentVisa. I'm both excited (and admittedly nervous) to be sharing it with you all today. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of AI agents and the more I experimented, the more I realized I was building on a fragile foundation. How do we build trust into these systems? How do we know what our agents are doing, and who gave them permission? My long-term vision is to give developers an "Agent Atlas" - a clear map of their agentic workforce, showing where…

    2025 · agentvisa.dev · its alternatives →

  14. 14IB

    I've built a job platform for technical roles called "Cracked Engineers". If you want to land a job with some of the world's best AI/tech startups - my goal is to make this the go-to place for that. YouTube walk-through can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmuIOdES7mQ A huge thank you to Weaviate (Bob van Luijt & team), Unsloth AI (Daniel Han & Mike), OpenPipe (David Corbitt), Julius AI (Rahul Sonwalkar), Jimini AI (Luis F Voloch) for using the platform while in beta and posting first paid posts. So, why did I build it? Well, over the past period a lot of…

    2024 · crackedengineers.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15AA

    Hey folks, I'm Yuval. I run a tiny startup called Glitter AI. It's just me full-time here, with a couple of freelances to help here and there. A couple of months ago, I went from managing zero requests to hundreds -- overnight (won Product of the day on Product Hunt). As someone who gets VERY easily distracted (maybe you relate), I had to find some sort of way of handling all the chaos if I didn't want to burn out. I came up with a pretty cool automation flow that I thought folks on HN here may be interested in reading about :) So here goes: Most of my interactions come through Intercom.…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I am working on this because I am always afraid of building things that people don't actually want. I let agents role-play analysis the idea, quote and debate with each other. Still working on the output quality, every feedback is priceless. Pls try it out!

    Jan 2026 · idea-council.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17RA

    Hey HN, I'm a founder at Ovlo a supply chain company.I had a problem. After every batch of customer interviews/research/feedback sessions, I'd run ideas through an LLM to help me decide what we should build next. Except it was obvious to my cofounder I wasn't really validating anything. LLMs are incredibly good at agreeing with you in subtle ways, especially when you feed them context that already reflects your thoughts. I'd ask "Does this make sense?" and get a beautifully worded essay about why yes, obviously, this is the best thing ever. I was using AI as an echo chamber without…

    Dec 2025 · roundtable.ovlo.ai · its alternatives →

  18. 18WM

    A community of Tech Lovers and Startup Founders - Improve your product, get more users and scale your business 🦄🚀 | 3246 members

    2021 · discord.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Seeking Wisdom #56

    2017 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20MS

    For years, I have struggled to understand my cash flow and save for the future. In addition to that, my wife has many credit cards and accounts that complicate matters. I am building a tool that connects all our accounts, helps us create a budget, and tracks and adjusts expenses on the fly. I am also sprinkling some AI magic on it for financial suggestions. I am looking for feedback on the implementation. More importantly, I am looking for more beta testers to improve the product.

    2023 · financemadelovely.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I wrote up a retrospective on my time working as a founder at DirectAI (https://directai.io). We learned a lot and I wanted to share some things I wish I had known ~18 months ago.

    2024 · brooks.team · its alternatives →

  22. 22LA

    Hi HN, I’m Harrison, co-founder of Listed. Today we're launching our agentic platform to help your business win in the new age of AI. You can try the platform here: https://getlisted.ai And watch the launch video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJUPo6H78z8 The idea for this came from pure frustration. I asked ChatGPT about my own company and it hallucinated, inventing features and getting basic facts wrong. I realized there was no mechanism for a business to provide a verified source of truth to these models. This problem is now existential. With Google's AI…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    For the last few months I have been analysing Peter Lynch’s books on stock picking and doing prompt engineering to check if AI could create useful stock analyses. To my surprise it started making reports that allow me to understand companies much faster with well cited sources. I hope you find it interesting and useful :) Perter Lynch’s books I analyzed: Learn to earn, One up on Wall Street, Beating the street

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24SL

    Hello Hackernews! I've been building startups for 3 years and finding my initial customers has always been a big struggle. I recently got into the "build in public" trend and love how it helps founders like us get noticed without big connections. I saw many of us sharing our ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) on IndieHackers, Twitter, and other places. But there wasn't a simple place to see how we're all doing compared to each other. So, I built StartupLeaderboard.com, a site where we can see each other's ARR and learn from it. It's straightforward: you share your ARR, see others, and we all get…

    2023 · startupleaderboard.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →