In my quick life on earth, I’ve began many companies.
In 2020, I used to be making face masks. One 12 months later, I used to be satisfied skincare was my calling, so I began making black cleaning soap. Now, that concept by no means made it off the bottom as a result of I by no means fairly mastered the craft, however for some time, I used to be all in.
Then there was the net restaurant, freelance gigs, a short try at making garments, and a handful of different concepts that felt simply as promising on the time, however typically, translating these concepts right into a product that truly labored was tough.
Not too long ago, I discovered myself as soon as once more sitting on a product concept that felt thrilling however barely out of attain. This time, I needed to strive one thing completely different as a substitute of letting it sit in my notes like many others earlier than it, and that was how I ended up on Projectmaven.
Based in March 2026 by Olaotan Towry-Coker, a serial entrepreneur who beforehand based AfriTickets, a ticketing platform, and Skull One, a Coworking area, Projectmaven is designed to show an concept right into a product.
“I’ve been constructing within the tech area since 2011,” Towry-Coker advised me after we spoke final Friday on the cellphone. “Non-technical founders who’re making an attempt to construct technical merchandise sometimes run right into a layer of friction, which is that if you happen to don’t perceive the technical side of what you’re constructing, you’re going to run into issues when you need to describe it to your developer.”
Projectmaven is his try to take away that friction. The platform makes use of synthetic intelligence (AI) to take a tough concept and switch it right into a structured plan with proposed options, goal customers, third-party integrations, technical structure, timelines, and value estimates.
How Projectmaven works
I get a whole lot of messages—emails, SMS, WhatsApp—typically concurrently. To cut back the overwhelm and make responding simpler, I dreamt of an app that would notify me of a message with a abstract of what the sender stated and three attainable replies I may faucet to ship. That was the concept that I took into Projectmaven.
Once I loaded the web site, it began with a single immediate asking for my concept, and I typed it in because it was in my head.
From there, Projectmaven started a nine-step course of to assist me determine what my product was.
Step one is product description, the place the AI agent mirrored my concept to me in a extra structured format. It broke down what it understood I used to be making an attempt to construct and the way it might work. It additionally highlighted the elements of the app I had not thought of, equivalent to entry to third-party messaging apps, privateness considerations, and difficulties in correct message summarisation. It confirmed me related current merchandise and prompt methods my model may stand out.
Towry-Coker defined that Projectmaven makes use of a mix of OpenAI and Gemini frontier fashions for its duties.
“We’ve applied fine-tuned prompts, customized prompts that enable the system to grasp the shopper’s request,” he advised me. “What it’s doing is that it takes the concept, does an online search, crunches all the information factors, after which it presents the information in a set format.”
The following step is deciding on the product scale, the place the AI agent prompted me to decide on if I needed the product to be further small, small, medium, or giant, relying on my aim. I chosen a small-scale product, principally a Minimal Viable Product (MVP).
In response to Olaotan, each selection a person makes at every step determines the lead to subsequent ones.
“Each step has an output that we’re making an attempt to attain… once you’re chatting with an AI agent, the immediate primarily dictates the end result that it offers you,” he stated. “We fine-tuned our prompts to particularly deal with every step that we’re constructing upon.”
After deciding on the size of my product, the web site prompted me to decide on my audience for the app.
The AI agent really helpful choices primarily based on my concept, which included busy professionals, enterprise house owners, buyer assist brokers, gig staff, and visually impaired customers.
Within the subsequent step, I needed to choose options, out of a curated listing, that made sense for the product I described. It allowed me to both settle for them or tweak them. I didn’t need to do both as a result of I hadn’t thought that far. I chosen the agent’s suggestions and moved to the subsequent step, integrations.
At this stage, it was getting extra technical as I needed to choose the exterior instruments and Utility Programming Interface (APIs) the product would wish to perform, equivalent to Gmail APIs, AI fashions for summarisation, and messaging programs. After integrations, it moved into design preferences, the place it displayed completely different visible instructions the app may take, prompting me to choose one.
The following step was technical integration. That is the place customers begin seeing issues like React Native, Firebase, Flutter, and native iOS—cell app improvement and backend service platforms.
The person may both select themselves or let the platform determine for them. On some other day, that is the place I’d take a look at, however I let Projectmaven select.
From there, it moved to the developer expertise, which required me to pick what stage of developer I wanted and confirmed estimated hourly charges. I selected a junior developer. I then chosen a timeline, decided by how complicated a product is and how briskly a person needs it constructed.
Twenty minutes and 9 steps later, Projectmaven generated a full challenge abstract detailing price estimates, a press release of labor, a product necessities doc, design course, technical stack, and integrations.
For my app, it estimated a value of about $5,720 over 160 hours, and broke the associated fee estimate down by function, hours required, and the developer price I had chosen.
Projectmaven goes a step additional, permitting customers to begin constructing the app on fast AI app builders equivalent to Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Cursor, and v0.dev. Choosing an choice offered a immediate that may very well be copied and pasted within the chatbox of those AI app builders. I used to be not going to let one other of my concepts sit in a doc, so I created a lovable account and ran the immediate.
It labored.
The end result wasn’t excellent as a result of it nonetheless displayed my app as a messaging app reasonably than simply being a pop-up notification (the entire level is that I don’t wish to need to open a messaging app ever once more). Nevertheless it was sufficient to see the construction, the summarised model of messages, and quick responses I may faucet to ship.
Who Projectmaven is for
Towry-Coker stated Projectmaven was initially constructed for founders like himself, who had concepts however struggled to translate them into what builders may work with. The early use case was to assist founders scope their concepts and get price estimates, however that didn’t final lengthy.
“What we discovered was that founders sometimes have a one-off want,” he stated. “They use it as soon as for a challenge and transfer on. However the individuals who really need it extra are builders and companies.”
This alteration mattered as a result of if a core person solely reveals up once they have a brand new concept and disappears instantly after, then it isn’t a sticky product. The founder has a really great tool. Builders may use Projectmaven to scope a founder’s concept and talk it with them.
Towry-Coker described the developer workflow as involving hours of calls to grasp a founder’s imaginative and prescient. In that context, Projectmaven compresses this prolonged course of, which straight impacts how builders become profitable.
Venture Maven runs on a subscription mannequin with tiered plans, all tied to a credit score system. Each motion undertaken on the platform, equivalent to producing outputs and refining concepts, consumes credit. The extra actions taken, the extra credit are consumed. The Free Plan gives 100 credit, the Starter Plan is priced at $17 month-to-month and gives 3,000 credit, whereas the $39 month-to-month Professional Plan gives 15,000 credit.
Venture Maven competes, loosely, with instruments like ChatGPT or Gemini, though it’s constructed on the identical underlying fashions, however the competitors is about course of. What Towry-Coker is making an attempt to exchange is the act of prompting itself, the trial-and-error of determining easy methods to get these fashions to suppose via a product.
A person who is aware of what they’re doing can replicate most of Projectmaven’s nine-step course of utilizing ChatGPT. What the platform does is take away the necessity to understand how to try this. As an alternative of ranging from a clean immediate field, customers transfer via a guided sequence of selections; the prompting nonetheless occurs, however hidden underneath faucets. That is useful for non-technical customers as a result of it turns an open-ended query right into a structured one, nevertheless it has the product’s limitations.
Projectmaven works greatest on the earliest stage, when an concept continues to be forming and desires shaping, however that is additionally the least technically tough a part of constructing a product. The platform doesn’t construct the product, validate whether or not it ought to exist, or remedy what occurs after it’s launched.
This begs the query: Is structuring the concept of a product sufficient to maintain it? The benefit of guided and structured prompting that Projectmaven has right this moment isn’t not possible to duplicate. It’s attainable to think about a future the place this type of structured prompting turns into constructed straight into bigger AI instruments, which may scale back Projectmaven’s edge.
The product works now: I used it, and in 20 minutes, I received a product that may have taken longer to determine by myself. However Projectmaven’s long-term guess is that such an issue nonetheless exists and requires a separate software to unravel. If structured prompting turns into customary, Projectmaven turns into a function inside bigger AI fashions.
Elevate your perspective with NextTech Information, the place innovation meets perception.
Uncover the newest breakthroughs, get unique updates, and join with a world community of future-focused thinkers.
Unlock tomorrow’s tendencies right this moment: learn extra, subscribe to our publication, and change into a part of the NextTech neighborhood at NextTech-news.com
