Vatsal M

Three months. Two developers. One feature nobody used.

I knew it was bad when I checked the analytics and saw that the only person who used it more than once was me. And even I stopped after the second week.

Here's how I knew it was a waste of time. Not in hindsight. In the moment. I just ignored the signs.

The first sign: I couldn't explain it in one sentence.

Last week we did something stupid.

We paused all human coding. Gave Claude (Anthropic) access to our GitHub repo. Told it to build new features, fix bugs, and ship.

No human review. No guardrails. Just Claude and our codebase.

For 7 days, it ran the engineering team.

There used to be at least some clear logic behind startup valuation.
You d take:
hours rate MVP cost.
That gave you a rough valuation floor.
Not perfect. But it was an anchor.
That anchor is now gone.
AI made MVPs almost free.
~$300. Two weeks. One person.
And if a product costs almost nothing to build
what is valuation based on now?
The answer is uncomfortable:
your product itself is no longer inherently valuable.
Investors no longer look at:
how long you ve been building
how many developers you have
how much money you ve invested into the product
Because none of that proves anything anymore.
Now there s only one question:
who is paying?
If no one is
then in their eyes, your startup is worth roughly what your MVP cost.
Here s what actually changed:
why pre-seed is now about MRR, not MVP
how investor requirements shifted
why solo founders suddenly became viable
and where moat actually lives when your product can be cloned in two weeks
Full breakdown here

https://substack.com/home/post/p...
And I have a qustion to you:
Did AI kill innovative startups and turn venture into short-term revenue games?
What do you think?