Your MVP (probably) Needs Less AI

Welcome back to NoteLoft Newsletter - the shortcut for founders who want to go from MVP to scale. Every week (ish - I’m working on it), my goal is to share what actually works when building software, so you can spend more time on deals, growth, and going to Pilates.

If you need help taking your product from MVP to scale, get in touch! We’ve grown our tech team, and we can’t wait to help you.

Let’s get into it!

Over the past six months, I’ve sat in dozens of intro meetings where a founder walks me through their product, glowing about an AI feature that, if we’re being honest, should probably be ripped out of their product and thrown in the trash.

The question is, why do they put it in there in the first place if I, after a 15 minute meeting, can see it doesn’t belong?

It’s because AI feels exciting; It feels innovative, fresh and new. It feels like getting in on the railroad when everybody else is using the steamboat, or the steamboat when everyone else is riding a horse. It feels like the thing you should be putting in your app if you want to attract users, or investors, or gain traction on social media.

The problem is that none of these are great reasons to put an AI feature in your app. So let me stop you from making a costly mistake.

Here are the five signs that I keep seeing that the AI feature you’re obsessed with needs to be removed from your app:

1. Users don’t want to pay for your AI feature
Founders will defend an AI feature they’ve never actually tested with possible customers. If no one has seen it, no one has validated it, and no one has said “YES… where do I pay”…get rid of it ASAP.

2. The only users who say they do want to pay for it are your family and friends.
Girl. I get it. But no. Your friends and family will (hopefully) always have your back. They want to support you, they want to see you win. And this is exactly why they are the last group of people you should be talking to.

3. It requires legal oversight you’re not prepared for.
If every iteration needs a lawyer to approve it, that’s not a feature. That’s a liability. And it’s one of the most expensive roads early-stage founders can go down.

4. You can build it cheaper, faster, and better without AI.
We all know AI has to hallucinate to do its job. That means that instead of running once, or twice, it will have to run multiple times to get the job done. That’s money wasted.. especially if the thing you’re doing with AI can be done in JavaScript or Python.

I find this happens a lot with features that involve scoring or filtering. If its a simple scoring algorithm, chances are a simple if/else statement or case statement will do. If the feature is filtering data, you might just need a good ORM on top of your PostgreSQL database.

5 . The technology isn’t actually there yet.
Not everything can be a ChatGPT wrapper. Not everything should be. Some ideas are simply ahead of their time, and forcing them into your product doesn’t make your app innovative—it makes it unstable.

Becoming the Founder Who Uses AI Strategically

At NoteLoft, we sit with founders every week who feel pressured to sprinkle AI across their entire product. Most of the time? We remove it. And the product becomes better — faster, cheaper, easier to maintain, and actually aligned with customer demand.

If you want to build something real — not bloated, not hype-driven, not built for investors instead of users…book a 15 minute intro call. Let’s talk!