Don't look for a lightbulb- find your McDonalds

How to use AI to find your McDonald's burger November 26, 2025

 One of the persistent myths about startups and founders is this supposed lightbulb moment. A founder or founders are sitting around and suddenly notice something none else has or ask a question ( usually devastatingly simple and obvious but groundbreaking) that results in an amazing original idea which leads to a huge new startup being founded and successfully scaling to a unicorn. This is incredibly rare. Most successful startups do not have lightbulbs moment behind them. Instead in the words of Paul Graham, the legendary cofounder of Y Combinator, most founders should just find things that people suck at doing.

There are lots of businesses out there where the product is underwhelming its clients. Possibly it hasn’t been updated in years, possibly the customer service model has slipped to non existent or possibly it hasn’t opened itself up to using new technologies to enhance its processes. It could be any of the above.

Dick Smith is an Australian billionaire entrepreneur with a national empire of electrical goods stores. He started because he got so annoyed with his local electronic store and its appalling customer service that he was driven to open his own store a few yards  down the street. It didn’t offer any different products. It just had a focus on providing great customer service. Now he’s a billionaire.

Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin brand, applies the same theory. He simply looks for areas where there is an incredibly poor customer experience and goes in with the Virgin brand to disrupt it. It doesn’t work every time but for every Virgin Brides there is a Virgin Atlantic airline or a Virgin Cruises or Virgin Active, the list goes on. It doesn’t just have to be about improving the customer experience.

As technology becomes available lots of businesses simply adopt the new tech to existing processes. This sticky plaster approach of building on legacy systems eventually creates an unwieldy inefficient mess. They never take the radical approach of rebuilding the entire process with the latest tech available. If you look space rockets - we had V rockets then Vostok then Sputnik then Saturn then Apollo before the space shuttle. Each one built on improving the design of the last one while retaining its fundamentals. With Space X Elon Musk threw out the rule book and asked what happens if we rebuild the entire design process with everything we now know. He reduced costs by 93% and built reusable rocket boosters.

 In ’ The Second Machine Age’ Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain how the arrival of electricity did not significantly impact manufacturing for decades.  They simply replaced the existing power source such as a water wheel with electricity with some slight improvements in speed and cost. It was 50 years before they realised they could completely reorganise the entire factory floor and reengineer the process using electricity to radically alter and improve manufacturing. The same happened with digital.

 If we think about banking over the last 30 years then we can see this gradual adoption playing out. We used to go to the branch to bank. Then we were able to use the phone then the internet and finally the mobile smartphone. At each stage banks just updated the channel of access with incremental improvements on speed and experience. It wasn’t until 2015 and the arrival of fintechs that anyone looked at reworking the entire customer experience and redefining as a whole what it means to bank. They have been so successful that as of today Revolut has larger market cap than Barclays.

 This happened a lot with the dotcom era. Business models were gradually updated to incorporate the enhanced ability that digital provided but it took years for them to be completely redesigned.

 However, with AI it is different. As Brett King says in our podcast chat https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bootstrapconfidential_ai-is-the-first-technology-that-has-agency-activity-7399035713620439040-nCrJ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAF1UkEBCY-a17j1ZdCo5zlZPvZI1z0Bcbk AI is agentic and that is a game changer. The speed with which processes can be redesigned and rebuilt is unlike anything we have seen before. Compared to dotcom it is proving to be almost instantaneous. This is where founders have an advantage.

 You are small and nimble. You have lo legacy systems or processes. The incumbents, your competitors, are large cumbersome, slow and unable to react quickly even as they try to. It is incredibly difficult to defend yourself against a new product or service that is faster, cheaper and better. The strength of the incumbent brand will prevail for while but after a period of time the laws of economics take over. This is what you should be thinking about as a founder.

 Have a look around you. Where is there a poor solution, an outdated process or a miserable customer experience that you can radically improve with your offering by using AI? Or in some cases even by just digitising it. Where are incumbents being slow to react? Where is there an opening for a fast disruptor to update and improve a product with a faster cheaper prcoess? It does not need to some genius lightbulb moment – that’s best reserved for Hollywood.

 When a 53 yr old milkshake salesman called Ray Kroc first tasted a McDonald's hamburger he could not believe the speed or the price or the consistency that the McDonald brothers had created with their new kitchen delivery system. It is now one of the most successful global franchises in history. Even in the culinary fortress that is France the allure of fast cheap and consistent is finally breaking down barriers and now it has more new McDonald restaurants than any other market.

 AI and agentic AI gives every founder the power to do this. Reinvent a product, a process or a service that sucks using AI or even just digital. Stop worrying about lightbulbs and find your McDonald's burger moment 😊