Enterprise Sales Needs Throwaway Demos – Nobody Has Built That Yet

01 /The Concept

First Concepts pitches itself as: "From idea to concept. Fast. In your style." The platform is purpose-built for drafting and sketching creative work – primarily video.

The target audience is creative agencies working for external clients, or in-house creative teams serving internal stakeholders across other departments.

Both face the same structural problem. To win a project or get internal sign-off, they first have to pitch it. That pitch needs to be more than a verbal description – it has to demonstrate what the final work will look and feel like, with visual references, rough cuts, and concept examples.

All of that takes time, money, and effort to produce. For a significant potential project, an agency might spend up to $250,000 and several weeks of staff time preparing a single pitch.

A typical agency runs up to 10 pitches per month. The math on client acquisition costs becomes staggering. But spend less on pitches, and the win rate drops.

First Concepts exists to accelerate and cheapen the production of pitches – "first concepts," quick drafts of future work. If the project is won, the actual deliverable gets produced with more care using other tools. The pitch is just a means to an end.

Importantly, the platform handles more than storyboards and rough clips. It generates briefs, guidelines, notes, and other presentation materials – and keeps all of them synchronized with each other automatically as things evolve.

The workflow is flexible: you can start from anything – a raw insight, a reference image, a cultural touchpoint, a one-liner that might become the hook. Whatever spark exists, the platform builds around it.

The entire pitch – all assets and materials – lives in a single project on the platform, shareable with the client via one link. Client feedback and comments flow back into the same workspace, and the next iteration can be built within the same environment.

First Concepts launched last year and raised its initial $200,000 shortly after. It now works with 40 agency clients and has just closed an additional $1 million in funding.

02 /Why It Matters

A growing trend in the startup ecosystem is the "AI agency" model – companies that build AI platforms and then use those platforms to deliver services directly, rather than selling software access. One example is Absurd ([related review](/review/bystro-nedorogo-ohu-nno)), a Y Combinator graduate that built a video creation AI platform and became a creative AI agency – producing product launch videos for startups.

First Concepts took the opposite bet: build a platform *for* agencies, not a replacement *of* them. The wager is not that boutique agencies will be displaced, but that they'll multiply. If that happens, First Concepts grows with them.

That wager has a real basis. AI has made it possible for small teams to execute work that previously required much larger operations. Boutique agencies are proliferating as a result.

But boutique agencies have their own challenges. One is scope: they're typically specialized, which makes it hard to land clients who need a comprehensive suite of services.

That's why Collective OS ([related review](/review/luchshe-ostatsja-malenkoj-kompaniej)) raised $2.5 million in January – building infrastructure that helps specialized agencies form partnerships to jointly serve clients with end-to-end capabilities.

A different problem is sales. Small agencies need to show prospective clients something concrete and compelling – specific examples of what they could produce *for this particular client*. That kind of bespoke presales work takes time and budget that boutique shops rarely have. First Concepts addresses exactly that gap for creative agencies.

The genuinely interesting angle: most AI platforms are built to produce *finished outputs*. First Concepts is built explicitly to produce fast, cheap *drafts* – artifacts designed to be used as sales tools and then discarded.

An a16z partner published a piece last August on "disposable software" – the idea that because AI makes software cheap and fast to build, we'll see a surge of things built for a single occasion and then thrown away. The author's own example: an Instagram-like app built so his kids could share photos of their cat with the family.

Using AI to produce disposable artifacts – not just software, but pitch materials, rough concepts, early-stage creative work – is a trend whose significance is still underappreciated.

03 /Opportunities

Two broad directions emerge from this review.

One is building AI platforms for boutique agencies that help them solve their sales and client service problems. The core bet: the number of small agencies will grow, taking over work previously done by larger firms that could handle more in-house. Small agencies won't have those capabilities – and will need platforms to fill the gaps. What other problems do boutique agencies face, beyond pitching creative work and forming cross-specialty partnerships?

The other is building AI platforms specifically for creating "disposable" outputs in domains where disposable products previously made no economic sense. No one would historically invest in producing a rough-cut video just to show one client during a pitch. And no one would build a social photo-sharing app just for family use – and yet that's exactly what the disposable software essay describes.

The practical question: in which domains can AI make one-time, purpose-built outputs viable – and which of those use cases generate genuine business value rather than just entertainment? That's still wide open.