Ask HN: Can internal AI-built tools become products for other companies?
2 TheBoomerDev 2 7/31/2025, 12:18:24 PM
One of the things we startups have is that we are agile when it comes to working, and having a small team helps make the organization more effective.
Also, thanks to AI tools like Lovable, Bolt, v0Dev, etc., if we need an internal tool that doesn’t require much complexity, we can develop it in just a few hours.
But of course, sometimes you wonder if those tools could actually become a product that more companies might need.
What do you think?
So for you to win that "build vs buy" equation, you need to be exceedingly flexible, easy, and cheap, in order to be a better choice vs just spending a few hours themselves. And you need to be a generic enough solution to a common enough problem that many companies need your solution. Which adds in one more challenge: any problem as common as that already has solutions.
So it is possible? Sure, maybe. But you are fighting a ton of headwinds, so it is not as easy as just packaging up a few hours of work and putting a price on it.
Whether it's your core value or not which might be a good thing to be crafted for customers to embrace.
I think it can be all over the ball park even for physical tools.
Turning a tool into a "product" can be a completely different effort compared to building the tool itself.
Lots of times you can pretty much start from a baseline where it's about an equal effort to turn an effective tool into a valuable product, as it is to build the tool to begin with.
With so many variables a 50:50 ratio would not be exact very much of the time really, but it should be possible to come up with a good guideline number for your situation which you can accept.
It has to be worth it to turn your marvelous tool into a product rather than spend that effort creating more marvelous tools.
Worth it in some way or another too, maybe not financially or with short-term deployment in mind either.