This summer, a solo founder built four mobile game MVPs using an AI coding assistant. Total cost: $200. Time to first playable: 48 hours.

That story isn’t an outlier—it’s a signal. The equation for building products has changed:

• Old equation: Hire a dev team → burn $50K/month → raise VC just to survive

• New equation: Use AI → ship in days → start earning before you ever need funding

At Tilted, we see this shift not as hype, but as the foundation of a new developer economy.

Why Developers Don’t Need VC for MVPs Anymore

The math speaks for itself:

• Traditional MVP: $100–200K, three devs, three months.

• AI MVP: $20/month Claude subscription + your time.

Iterations that once took two weeks now take two hours. A founder can build, test, and kill three game concepts in the time it used to take to set up a dev environment.

That velocity rewrites the rules: pre-seed rounds lose relevance, technical co-founders become optional, burn rates collapse, and the real power shifts to distribution.

Where Tilted Fits In

Tilted is building with AI to give developers more than speed—we’re giving them ownership and new revenue rails:

• Tag & Earn: Fans tag live game moments, generating AI-ready datasets. Developers tap into this stream to train smarter models without building their own annotation pipeline.

• Clip & Flex: Short-form clips become tokenized, remixable, and monetizable. Developers can integrate these mechanics directly into their games to boost engagement.

• AI Agents & Tools: Our data layer supports AI agents that can be trained, owned, and even traded—turning what used to be sunk development costs into assets.

We’re not just building AI features; we’re creating an open ecosystem where developers can bootstrap, experiment, and scale with far fewer resources.

The Brutal Implications

For VCs, this changes everything. The “fundable PowerPoint” era is over. In its place: profitable prototypes that reach real users before venture capitalists can react.

The founders who’ll need VC are those scaling past $10M ARR, looking for user acquisition capital—not those validating their first product.

Tilted exists for the builders who want to bootstrap, monetize early, and let the community own part of the upside.

The Bigger Vision

AI has flattened the cost of creation. Tilted is flattening the cost of distribution and monetization. Together, these shifts open the door to a world where anyone can turn gameplay, data, and creativity into income.

The next great studio won’t start with a Series A. It will start with an idea, an AI prompt, and Tilted.