A hands-on workshop for pre-startup founders and early-stage teams.
Business-first · No coding background required
This workshop is about using AI to plan and build real products from a business perspective. It is not a coding course. Over two short sessions you will learn a way of thinking and a way of working that lets a small team design, plan, and prototype things that used to require a much larger company.
Everything you need is in this repository. There are no slides. We follow these documents together on screen, and we step into real tools as we go.
You are a founder or an early team working on a startup case. Some of you are technical, some are not. That is exactly the point: in the AI era you no longer need to write code to build, but you do need to think clearly and describe what you want precisely. This workshop is built around that skill.
We focus on three things:
- Mindset — seeing AI as a new capability for your company, not just a faster tool.
- Planning — turning a business idea into documentation that AI tools can build from.
- Building — going from a plan to a working prototype with AI.
We deliberately stay out of deep technical topics. You will not need to understand infrastructure, frameworks, or programming. When a technical term shows up, it is explained in plain language.
By the end you should have:
- A new mindset. You see where AI changes what is possible for your business, not only where it makes existing work faster.
- The ability to recognise new AI-related opportunities in your own case.
- The courage to dive in, experiment, and move fast. In this field, building something imperfect quickly beats planning something perfect slowly.
You will leave with AI-based planning skills and practical techniques, a finished PRD (defined below), a working prototype, and three concrete actions for the week.
The workshop is two days, three hours each day.
- Day 1 — Monday, 16:00–19:00: The new AI mindset, and planning in the AI era. See day1.md.
- Day 2 — Tuesday, 16:00–19:00: Vibe coding in practice, tools and prompting, and bringing your own idea to life. See day2.md.
There are no slides. We read and follow these Markdown files together, and we move into tools for the exercises. Each session ends with an exercise you run on your own startup case, using prompts that are ready to copy from these documents.
What is Markdown (.md)? Markdown is a simple way to write formatted text using plain characters:
#for headings,-for bullet points, and so on. These workshop files are written in Markdown. Learning to read and write Markdown is a small but real goal of this workshop, because it is the format AI tools understand best.
Please do these two things before Day 1, or in the first few minutes if you arrive ready.
Open the AI tool you already use — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Make sure it understands your business.
The cleanest way to do this is to use a project. A project is a workspace inside the AI tool that keeps a set of documents and a shared context across many conversations, so you do not have to re-explain your business every time.
- If you already have a project with your business case context, use it.
- If not, create a new project and upload the key documents about your startup: your pitch, your business plan, customer notes, anything that describes what you are building and for whom.
Why this matters: Throughout the workshop you will ask the AI to reason about your case, not a generic one. The quality of every answer depends on how well the tool understands your business.
Take Lovable into use. Lovable is an AI tool that turns a written description of an app into a working web prototype — you describe what you want in plain language and it builds the interface and basic functionality for you.
- New users get 100 free credits. Credits are what Lovable spends each time it builds or changes something for you.
- If you already have a Pro plan, create a new workspace to get the same 100 credits for the workshop.
We use Lovable on Day 2 to turn your plan into a prototype.
You do not need slides for this workshop. But if you would like a personal deck that mirrors the workshop content and connects each theme to your own business, you can generate one.
How to do it: Copy the workshop content from this repository and give it to the AI tool you prefer — ChatGPT, Claude (or Claude's design view), Lovable, NotebookLM, or similar. Then paste the prompt below.
Tip: Give the AI both the link to this repository (so it can read the workshop content) and your own startup documents (so it can make the deck specific to you).
You are my business mentor, and your job is to help me move my own business
forward. You represent a modern startup-building and accelerator perspective,
like Y Combinator, and the view of experienced, respected early-stage
investors such as Lifeline Ventures or Sequoia.
My situation and task right now: I am taking part in an AI-native business
development workshop. I want to get the full value out of it for developing
my business and myself. Attached is the workshop content (a link to a GitHub
repository the AI can read) and files describing my own startup case. Based
on these, produce the following for me.
1) A SLIDE DECK that brings in this workshop's content and flow, so I can
follow the workshop from my own deck. Do not add any new content to the
slides — only organise the facilitator's content into slides. Do not leave
out anything essential; do not over-summarise. However, under each workshop
theme, add a section titled "What could this mean for our business case?"
In that section, raise the angles of this theme that are genuinely relevant
to my business. You may also create prompting questions for me, for the
facilitator, or for other participants. A prompting question is a question
designed to spark thinking, to make us reflect, or to ask others how the
theme could apply in my business context.
2) A "MY FOCUS POINTS" DOCUMENT. Base this on an analysis where you study the
workshop themes and content and analyse my startup case documentation.
Through that, identify at least 10 focus points and learning/implementation
objectives that, based on your analysis, are truly meaningful for my
business case. "Meaningful" means a business opportunity, an area to apply,
something to learn, a risk, a weakness, or a new perspective. I want this
document to help me understand which parts of the workshop are genuinely
meaningful, relevant, and timely for my startup, and which are less so. It
should guide my focus toward the things my case benefits from most.
Focus points can take different forms: "what if" types, "learn this
carefully because…", "ask about this", "here you may have a risk", "have
you considered this?", "develop this further". Each focus point has a title
that describes it clearly in one sentence, plus a short 1–2 sentence note on
why it is meaningful or what it could mean for my business.
Use the language of a skilled, experienced business mentor. Keep the content
clear and easy to read.
This workshop is facilitated by Tommi Järvinen, a senior expert in commercialisation, startup development, and business design. Tommi has more than 15 years of experience helping new businesses, technologies, and research-based innovations move toward market.
Tommi Järvinen tommi@firstkiss.co