How to build MVPs with AI | Starter Story

When Pat Walls, host of Starter Story, asked his guest to share a step-by-step playbook for building an MVP with AI, the answer was refreshingly concrete: start with Perplexity, not a coding bootcamp. The guest’s method is built on the premise that a complete beginner can ship a functional product by treating AI as a layered set of tools, each suited to a different stage of the build. The psychology behind this approach is simple: reduce cognitive load by breaking the process into discrete, error-tolerant steps, and let the AI handle the parts that typically cause beginners to quit.

The Perplexity-First Strategy

The guest recommends that anyone starting from zero open Perplexity, not a code editor. “I would recommend everyone to use Perplexity,” he said, because it has the most up-to-date documentation for any tool or library. The key move is to tell the AI, “I’m completely new and absolutely don’t know how to do anything.” Perplexity’s deep research mode then pulls up a long, detailed document that serves as a reference you can follow step by step. This works because Perplexity surfaces current information from across the web, including official docs and community solutions, which older models might miss. The psychological trick here is that you don’t need to know what you don’t know—you just need to admit ignorance and let the AI scaffold the learning for you.