Today, on a flight from Austin to NYC, I did some deep work to better understand the competitive landscape for what we’re building at Adios (a personal inventory and resale assistant).

At first, I was a bit alarmed… as dozens of “AI-powered” closet organizers, style matchers, and “one snap scan your whole closet” apps populated my feed. Worried that I’d somehow missed this in my previous research, I rolled up my sleeves and dug in, opening each link and doing the human work of figuring out who was really building an app, and who had thrown up a no-code website over an impassioned weekend.

Then I remembered… AI slop.

First off, our landing page is legit embarrassing right now (mostly because I built it and possess the design skills of a potato).

So I’m not throwing shade on anyone’s style; instead, I was relieved to realize what I was seeing was just the extension of AI slop, aka:

AI Startup Slop 🍑

We’ve all been guilty of it in the past year or two. It’s easy to get all hopped up after hearing the billionaires opine about the inevitability of the “one-person billion-dollar startup” or watching a YouTube clip of how {insert dude’s name} spun up a company that does {insert large amount of $} EACH MONTH, using ONLY AI.

But don’t get taken in…

Lucky for us, real entrepreneurs (e.g., those of us who have hired, fired, paid taxes, and state registration fees), the brutal grind of startup life tends to weed out the AI Startup Slop after the first few frenzied months of Replit websites and Twitter diatribes.

Takeaway: AI has 100% made parts of building something from scratch easier. But it’s also encouraged the same people who in 1925 would have been hawking snake oil cures to ‘build startups’ using AI-generated websites, AI-generated copy, and AI-generated marketing materials. These new entrants may at first have the veneer of legitimacy, but just because a dozen new websites may exist in your niche, don’t get discouraged—most of them are probably just A.S.S.