The Rise of AI and Its Implications for Entrepreneurs

Here I am going to write down how recent advances in AI influence the creation of new startup ideas. touch grass once in a while This blog post is written by me, Nikolai Tschacher, in August 2026 completely alone. I will not even use AI to grammar check or to improve my non mother tongue English. Spell check is being done completely manually, risking that my readers will feel like Batrick Bateman during the business card scene in the movie American Psycho. On a more brigth side, writing something slithly wrong gives us humans a fuzzy warm feeling and let's us relate more compared to reading professional and "just too good" AI ramblings. Introduction When I started working on my business ipapi.is, I did everything on my own: I programmed ipapi.is from scratch without the help of any LLM or AI tools. I guess I started slowly somewhere around 2020 or 2021 with the first ingredients that would later become the IP API that I have now. ipapi.is works quite fine and it gives me immense freedom, financially and also time wise. I got lucky here, but I also worked extremely hard on it. To some extent it's also a copy of ipinfo.io, and Ben Dowling seems to be the one that came up with the concept of putting IP address meta data into a simple JSON API. So thanks to him as well. But I digress. I first started using ChatGPT around November 2022 and even back then it truly shocked me. I first realized that this chatbot is not a stupid thing such as Eliza. When prompted with inputs such as "Please write me a funny short poem in Jambus style about a fat cat from the canary islands that struggles to catch a fish" the current chatgpt gives me an extremely funny short poem: Upon the rocks he waits all day, A chubby cat beside the bay. He sees a fish and strikes with pride— Then belly-flops into the tide. The fish swims off; the cat looks grim, For fishing clearly isn’t him. He shakes his paws and starts to wish That someone served him canned tuna fish.