I need an AI business coach to help me think through my software idea

Thinking an idea through on your own is hard. You know the parts you've thought about, and the gaps are invisible to you. A good coach finds those gaps, asks the awkward questions in a sensible order and helps you decide what to do next. An AI coach can do a lot of that, any time you like and for free, if it's built to ask questions and push back.

What a good AI business coach does

1. It leads. You shouldn't have to know which questions to ask. A coach works through the important ones in order: who it's for, what problem it solves for them, why they'd choose you, what the first version needs and what you'll charge.
2. It asks one question at a time. A wall of twenty questions gets twenty shallow answers. One good question, followed up, gets you thinking.
3. It pushes back. If you say your customer is "small businesses", it should ask which ones, and who inside them would actually pay. AI models tend to agree with whatever you say, so a good coach has to be built to challenge you.
4. It keeps track. By the end you should have a written plan, with what you know separated from what you're guessing.
5. It sends you out. The coach can't tell you whether people will pay. Only they can. A good one helps you decide which guess to check first, what to ask and what to put in front of people, then helps you make sense of what happened.

Watch out for the opposite: a tool that turns one paragraph about your idea into a polished business plan straight away. It reads well, but the confident bits are the AI's guesses dressed up as yours.

Meet Sal

We built Sal, a free AI business coach, for exactly this. With ChatGPT, you have to know what to ask and keep a long chat on track. Sal does that part: you talk it through, out loud or typed, and he leads the conversation from who pays to what the first version needs. He pushes back when an answer is thin, and he writes the plan as you go, with the guesses marked: a Business Spec, a roadmap, your pricing and plans, a draft website and a brief you can give to Lovable, Claude Code or a developer.

Sal is built for software you'd sell to other people or businesses. If it's an app just for you, you don't need a business plan.

What a coach can't do for you

The conversation is the start. A coach helps you get clear on your best guesses, but the answers come from the people you want to sell to. Talk to five of them, put something rough in front of them and ask someone to pay. Then bring what happened back to the coach and update the plan. There's more on that first round in what to do next with your idea, and the guide to starting a software business covers the whole process.