A Million in Hand Beats a Billion in the Cloud

01 /The Concept

Audos describes itself as a place where "everyday entrepreneurs can build small AI companies."

Unlike most platforms in this space, Audos doesn't push people to chase billion-dollar startup ideas. Its thesis is that a million-dollar outcome is enough for most people. If a billion-dollar company is called a unicorn, Audos calls the million-dollar version a "donkey corn" – complete with an illustration on the homepage.

Audos claims it has a methodology for identifying people who can build these smaller ventures and helping them apply their existing knowledge to everyday problems that other people face.

In practice, users build web services and apps by chatting with the platform's AI assistant.

But the process starts with alignment: before anything gets built, the AI helps the user create a clear picture of what they're actually trying to make. The first questions are about the intended user – which might be the entrepreneur themselves, or someone they know.

If you tell the AI about your friend who's struggling to get clients for her nail salon, it will start narrowing down the problem: "Is foot traffic low even though the location is busy?" or "Are online ads not converting?" or "Are existing clients not referring anyone?" The conversation keeps drilling down until the actual problem is defined and a plausible solution takes shape.

The word "plausible" is doing real work here – because the first version is a minimum viable product. The user hands it to their friend to test, then reports back what happened. The AI takes that feedback and suggests next iterations.

Through this loop, active users naturally flow into Audos's acceleration program, where they can get support not just from the AI but from the startup's human experts – for defining the idea, sharpening the audience, and building or improving the product.

For users who start seeing traction, Audos offers funding of up to $25,000 – in exchange for 15% of revenue from the product, in perpetuity.

Note the structure: not 15% equity in a company, but 15% of ongoing revenue. That makes Audos's business model look more like the App Store than a traditional accelerator. Unlike the App Store, though, Audos actively helps create products worth selling.

The App Store comparison is intentional. As one of the co-founders puts it: "We want to find a way to create a million companies each earning a million dollars a year. That's a trillion-dollar business."

To support those ambitions, Audos has now raised an initial $11.5M.

02 /Why It Matters

It's worth noting that the Audos founders previously built Prehype, a venture studio that raised roughly $60M starting in 2010. That studio operated on the conventional model: tech entrepreneurs, big bets, unicorn-or-bust.

Now they've made a deliberate pivot. Startups should be million-dollar outcomes, not billion-dollar moonshots. And the people building them shouldn't be a few hundred exceptional tech founders willing to dedicate a decade to a long shot – they should be hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who want to solve a problem for someone else and make money doing it. Possibly just in their spare time.

This democratization of entrepreneurship obviously couldn't have happened without AI. Which makes Audos's model timely at minimum – and potentially a leading indicator of how the startup ecosystem restructures itself around AI capabilities.

The underlying technology – building web services through conversational AI – is no longer novel. But the positioning and the target audience are different from anything else in the market.

Bolt offers to build "stunning apps and websites with AI" without giving any guidance on what's actually worth building.

Lovable offers examples, but they're clearly aimed at technical builders. Featured projects include crypto trading dashboards, AI integrations, and avatar generators.

Replit's example prompt – "Build me a business tool for financial advisors with inventory and supply chain management and a customizable reporting dashboard" – is not written for the average person.

Audos targets a completely different audience pursuing completely different goals, starting from problems concrete enough to describe in terms of real people they know.

To reach that audience, Audos also uses non-traditional channels. Its Instagram ads are written in plain language:

"Would you like to make money doing what you already do in your spare time? Can you picture someone who would pay you for it? Describe that person and our AI will help you build something for them by the end of this week."

Or: "Starting a business with Audos is a three-step process. You know how to do something. Tell our AI. It'll build you an AI agent you can use to find your first paying customers."

The contrast with competitors is stark. Bolt, Lovable, and Replit position themselves as tools for building software products. Audos positions itself as a way to make money from what you already know how to do – and turns getting there into the product.

03 /Opportunities

Worth repeating here: what makes a product a product isn't its technology – it's [positioning](/review/svojo-mesto-v-chuzhih-mozgah). Who it's for, what it promises, what property it owns in the buyer's mind. The same underlying technology can power entirely different products; products can look identical to users while running on completely different stacks. The current wave of AI-enabled technology creates a genuine opportunity: take an existing technology layer and build a different product on top of it for an audience nobody else is serving.

A related direction was touched on in a [recent review](/review/staryj-infobiznes-umrjot-no-rynok-to-ostanetsja) of Delphi, a platform for creating digital twins of experts, creators, and public figures. The critique there: digital twins that give advice are just "blah blah blah" scaled up. What would actually be valuable is a platform that converts expertise into products that produce measurable outcomes – not words, but actions.

Audos's ad copy actually describes exactly that concept. You know how to do something. The AI makes it executable. People pay for the result, not the brand.

So the other direction worth pursuing is building platforms that turn human expertise into products – regardless of whether the model is identical to Audos's or not. The pool of people who are genuinely good at something is enormous. Helping them convert that expertise into sellable products is a real business.

Especially if you aim somewhere in the vicinity of Audos's stated goal – "a million products earning a million dollars each." Even if you scale that back to 100,000 products at $100,000 each, or 10,000 at $10,000 each – that's still serious money