How to find ideas ($42K/month founder) | Starter Story

The founder of a tool called CodeGuide was running an MVP agency and spending nine to ten hours per project chatting with ChatGPT to generate technical documentation and knowledge bases for AI coding tools. He turned his manual prompt sequence into an automated workflow using Make.com, and that single change saved seven hours out of nine. That felt magical. He built a landing page in 30 minutes using Bolt, and within two weeks, 1,800 people had signed up for the waitlist.

The idea came from solving his own workflow bottleneck

The founder was not searching for a startup idea. He was trying to make his own agency work less painful. The problem was specific: each client project required a custom knowledge base that he could attach to AI coding assistants like Cursor or Copilot. Doing that manually meant hours of repetitive prompting. Automating that sequence with Make.com was a personal productivity hack, not a business plan. The 1,800 sign-ups in two weeks told him other people had the same bottleneck. That signal—unprompted, organic demand from a landing page—was what turned a personal script into a product. He did not do customer interviews or market sizing. He just watched what happened when he put a simple page up.

Early distribution relied on a single viral post