If you’re starting a business — especially a tech startup — there’s one thing that matters more than almost anything else, and it’s not branding, not vibes, and definitely not perfection.
It’s runtime.
Runtime is how long you can stay alive before money runs out. That’s it. Everything else is secondary.
And here’s the thing most founders miss: in 2026, being scrappy doesn’t mean ramen noodles and sleeping on a couch anymore. Scrappy today means something very specific. It means Founder plus AI beats a bloated team with a scary burn rate.
The best founders I see right now don’t hire early. They delay hiring as long as humanly possible and instead replace the first “obvious” roles with AI. Not because they’re cheap — but because they’re disciplined.
Take something basic, like a pitch deck. Old world: you hire a consultant, loop in a designer, wait two weeks, and burn €3–5k before you’ve even talked to a serious investor. New world: you draft the structure and story with ChatGPT, tighten the narrative, sanity-check the numbers, and then drop everything into PowerPoint AI Designer, Beautiful.ai, Gamma, or any decent AI presentation tool. Same story, cleaner slides, done in a weekend, and your burn rate stays intact.
Once that’s done, people usually panic about visuals. Branding. Product images. “We don’t look legit yet.” That problem is basically gone. AI image generators are really, really good now 👇— especially if you use detailed prompts (which, ironically, AI is also great at writing). Backgrounds, product mockups, and even early brand direction can all be generated fast enough to keep momentum without hiring a designer too early. You look serious, investors focus on the idea, and no one cares that the logo wasn’t born in a three-week brand sprint.
This is where I like to use the Cinderella-and-the-Seven-Dwarfs analogy. Cinderella is your idea. You’ve got the pitch, the story, the vision. The seven dwarfs are the people you think you need next — sales, marketing, support, design, operations, finance, data. Traditionally, that’s where startups start hiring and quietly light money on fire.
But here’s the kicker: you don’t hire the dwarfs anymore. You deploy them.
AI agents. AI tools. AI workflows.
A single founder with a small, well-chosen AI stack can now do what used to require eight to ten people. And this isn’t some bootstrap-only philosophy either. Investors actually love this. Even the ones writing big cheques respect founders who are relentless about efficiency. Scrappy founders extend runway, learn faster, waste less, and squeeze more signal out of every euro.
Whether you’re bootstrapping, pre-seed, or waiting for your first investment, being scrappy isn’t about being cheap. It’s about being intentional. This mindset is especially obvious if you’re building anything complex — deep tech, biotech, climate, AI-heavy products — where survival depends on focus, not headcount.
The good news is you don’t have to guess anymore. The team at Like Magic AI prepared a full breakdown of the startup roles you can replace or heavily augment with AI, why it works, and how much money it actually saves in euros.
If you want the full list with explanations and examples, you can download the PDF below.
Scrappy founders win.
AI just makes it unfair.
