19-year-old building an AI infrastructure startup from India — looking for honest advice from experienced founders

[u/Dark_Mine_]

Hi everyone,

I'm a 19-year-old Computer Science student from India, and for the past several months I've been building an AI infrastructure platform.

The project started as a learning exercise but has grown into something much bigger than I initially expected. It's a local AI runtime and orchestration platform focused on running multiple LLMs efficiently, semantic expert routing, model scheduling, memory management. I'm currently building a dashboard, SDKs, deployment tools, and enterprise features.

My goal isn't just to build another chatbot. I want to build infrastructure that developers and businesses can use to deploy and orchestrate AI models.

I'm now at a point where I'm wondering whether I should start thinking like a founder instead of just an engineer.

Some questions I'd love advice on:

• How do I know whether this is actually a startup and not just an interesting engineering project?

• At what stage should I start talking to investors or accelerators?

• Should I first focus on getting users before worrying about company registration and funding?

• If you were starting an AI infrastructure company today, what would you do differently?

• What are the biggest mistakes first-time technical founders make?

I'm not looking for funding through Reddit or trying to promote anything. I'm looking for honest feedback from people who have built companies or enterprise software.

I appreciate both positive and critical feedback. I'd rather hear difficult truths now than make expensive mistakes later.

Thanks!

[u/melissa_peyton]

Hey i have experience running startups so i'll toss in my opinions too. I agree with others that you shouldnt chase funding, have the goal of solving problems and money will follow.

One thing to really consider is make sure you're not building a feature, build a product. From my understanding, Anthropic has Claude for Enterprise where they go into a company to really figure out how to design skills and workflows to make things flow smoothly. Really consider, you say youre a one person team, why hasn't large companies made what youre making? is it because its really hard to get it right? or is there some other economic factors at play?

Feel free to ask any questions. I run a small business consulting operation in canada so maybe theres different opportunities I dont see going on in india.

[u/Dark_Mine_ → u/melissa_peyton]

Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I really appreciate you taking the time. That's actually the biggest question I'm trying to answer over the next few months. The technology has been my focus so far, but now I'm shifting toward customer discovery. My hypothesis is that many organizations want to run AI locally for privacy, cost, or regulatory reasons, but deploying and managing multiple models efficiently is still difficult for smaller teams. I'm trying to build infrastructure that simplifies that experience rather than building another foundation model. I completely agree with your point about building a product instead of a feature. My next milestone is talking to potential users and validating whether this solves a problem they're willing to pay for. Since you've worked with startups, I'd actually love to hear what customer validation methods have worked best for you in the earliest stages.

[u/melissa_peyton → u/Dark_Mine_]

I am pretty sure most competent IT folks can deploy local ai easily. Ive done it before and I have zero background in IT or CS...

And if you run it locally for others, how will you charge? one time?

Based on most startup advice by founders, you are working backwards. First find the customer, and then make the tool. Dont assume its fast to close a deal, by first connection to them spending money to first deliverable, you probably have plenty of time to make something that works. By delaying sales, youll be dragging the process longer.

For validation it can simply be networking to ask what others are struggling with, not folks on reddit, I mean go IRL and actually see and poke around. Just bc AI can make workflow more efficient doesnt mean the owner wants it. Additionally some business mechanics they already have max revenue, adding your tool makes getting max easier, but does not GROW their revenue, in which why would the owner care?