On Monday, October 6th, OpenAI killed our startup.

Or at least, that is what it felt like for a few hours.

Our team's Slack went silent. The kind of silence that is louder than any notification. For hours, nothing. Then, a single message from my co-founder, Roopak, lit up my screen: "Are we dead or are we still surviving?"

By morning, our phones were a firehose of screenshots of OpenAI's new Agent Kit. Everyone we knew was asking, "What's the plan?" We were drowning in an echo chamber of thousands of posts declaring us dead. Frankly, most of it was influencer bait from people who had not even tried the tool.

The anxiety was crushing.

Then, we got access. And just like that, the fog of marketing hype cleared. When you ignore the noise and analyze the core tech, only a few simple truths remain.

Three Truths That Saved Our AI Startup

Truth 1: Different Game, Different Audience

OpenAI is playing to win the developer ecosystem. Our focus is entirely on builders: the non-technical user, the marketer, the operator. We are solving problems for people who will never open a developer portal. We believe in builders. That has been our manifesto from day one.

Truth 2: AI Control vs. User Control

Their approach hands the keys to the AI, which leads to slow, unpredictable results. For critical business tasks, that is a non-starter. Sketch, our AI assistant, never takes an external action without human approval. You get a Slack message with the proposed action, you tap a checkmark, and only then does it execute. That is a fundamentally different philosophy from "set it and forget it." (We wrote more about this in why control is the real differentiator.)

Truth 3: PhD-Level AI, 90s-Era UI

The intelligence is futuristic, but the drag-and-drop interface feels dated. Building with AI should be a conversation in Slack, not a game of connecting boxes on a screen. You should be able to say "Hey Sketch, draft a follow-up for the prospect who commented on my LinkedIn post" and have it just happen.

How Competitive Threats Become Validation

This was not the last time. A week later, it was n8n's copilot. Both felt like heavyweight jabs, that familiar founder dread that settles deep in your stomach. Is this it? Are we building in a space that has already been won?

Then, the fog clears. The dread sharpens into focus. This is not a threat; it is validation on a global scale. The giants are confirming our bet: the hunger for custom AI agents is insatiable.

OpenAI's Amazon Playbook for AI

Here is the pattern we started to see. Product announcements coming out of OpenAI have been unnerving. Agent Kit, Agent SDK, and now a native Slack integration.

See it?

They are shifting from core model improvements to shipping application-layer features. The uncomfortable truth is the intelligence race has hit a plateau. When you can no longer win by shipping the best models, you find new ways to grow by moving up the stack.

It is the classic Amazon playbook, just applied to AI:

1. Build the foundational model (the platform).

2. Let thousands of startups build wrappers on it (the sellers).

3. Identify the most successful use cases (meeting bots, Slack assistants).

4. Absorb them into the core product and compete directly.

The platform is officially competing with its own ecosystem. The real question is: how many startups built on OpenAI's API today will survive this time next year?

Why We Are Still Building

Absolutely. The anxiety is real. But it is no longer a shapeless fear. It is a clear, focused challenge. We know exactly who we are building for and the specific problems we need to solve.

While they build for developers, we remain obsessed with our corner of the universe: the non-technical builders. And amidst the noise, we celebrated a quiet win: our first 50 workflows went live. That is not hype. It is progress.

As we shared in our journey from alpha to beta, building through fear is just part of the startup experience.

The punches will keep coming. For us, it is just fuel. For now, it is heads down. Time to shut out the noise and build.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do AI startups survive when OpenAI copies their features?

The key is differentiation by audience, not by technology. If your product serves a specific user segment (like non-technical builders) with a fundamentally different UX approach (like conversational workflow creation instead of drag-and-drop), you can coexist with platforms that target developers.

Is the OpenAI Agent Kit a threat to no-code AI tools?

The Agent Kit targets developers who are comfortable with APIs and SDKs. No-code and low-code AI tools serve a different audience entirely: operators and marketers who need AI workflows without touching code. The market is large enough for both.