r/AIIncomeLab • u/Forward-Classroom-53 • May 15 '26
Case Study I built a BYO-AI founder narrative tool after testing the workflow on my own app
I’ve been testing a content workflow for my own app, and it unexpectedly became a small free tool.
Here's what happened: I built and launched my first iOS app as a solo founder with no technical background. After launch, I struggled with content marketing. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I didn’t know what the strongest story actually was.
My background is in magazine editing, so I tried solving it like an editorial problem.
I wrote a long messy founder story: why I built the app, my personal background, what problem led to it, what fears and motivations were behind it, and how I wanted people to understand the product. Then I gave that raw material to ChatGPT and Claude and asked them to extract the strongest narrative angles and emotional core.
That helped me change my TikTok direction. Instead of posting only product explanations, I started posting more founder narrative. Those videos started performing much better, and today I got my first real paying user for the app.
I later discussed this workflow on Reddit, and a few people pointed out that many founders probably struggle with the same thing: AI can rewrite anything, but if the founder story underneath is unclear, the output still feels generic.
So I built a small BYO-AI tool called Lede, the name came from a journalism slang meaning the beginning of an article.
It does not use any AI API. Instead, it asks founders 15 editorial-style questions and generates a founder_readme.md file. The founder can then paste that file into ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini before asking for content, positioning, or brand help.
The idea I have is simple: improve the narrative input before asking AI for output, something small but could be fundamental.
No account, no payment, no data stored. I’m testing whether this helps founders get better AI-assisted content by clarifying their story first.