Gutcheck.AI: Bringing Data and Accountability to Entrepreneur Support

For many entrepreneur support organizations, selecting promising founders and tracking their progress can be more complicated than it should be. Gutcheck.AI was created to help change that by giving program managers a clearer, more continuous view of founder progress that replaces fragmented, self-reported updates with a record that can continue beyond the end of a program.

The inspiration for Gutcheck.AI came from seeing organizations make important decisions based largely on gut instinct, only to discover later that they had missed significant developments. One program director shared a particularly telling example: she learned that one of her founders had raised $600,000 just two weeks after completing her program, and she was only able to find out because the founder happened to mention it in a social media post. Experiences like this highlighted the need for a better way to track founder outcomes and demonstrate impact.

Gutcheck.AI is designed for Entrepreneur Support Organizations (ESOs) that want a more reliable way to understand what happens to founders during and after their programs. The goal is to create a continuous record that follows founders beyond a single program, can carry into future programs, and gives organizations a defensible way to demonstrate outcomes to funders and leadership.

Building a pre-seed startup comes with its own challenges. For Gutcheck.AI, one of the biggest has been balancing product development, customer research, and the work required to fund the business. Rather than trying to solve those challenges in isolation, founder Corey Lipsey has focused on talking directly with the people experiencing the problem.

That approach became an important part of Corey's experience at the Tech Incubator at Queens College (TIQC). Working with Ying provided an opportunity for real product discovery and not simply building something that worked, but testing ideas that could genuinely improve the workload of program managers. The experience helped Corey develop a habit of listening closely to users and using their feedback to continually improve the product.

For Corey, that user-first approach is also the biggest lesson he would share with other entrepreneurs: talk to real people and solve their real problems. According to Corey, that's how entrepreneurs learn, iterate, and grow. Everything else is guessing.

The next step for Gutcheck.AI is focused on putting those lessons into practice. Corey is preparing to present the latest iteration of Gutcheck at 1 Million Cups (1MC) and is working toward a full pilot this fall. For a young company, the pilot represents an important opportunity to test the product in a real-world environment and gather the next round of insights from users.

Gutcheck.AI's journey reflects an important principle of entrepreneurship: meaningful products are often built by listening before building. With continued iteration, user feedback, and support from the TIQC community, Corey is working toward a solution that can help Entrepreneur Support Organizations better understand, track, and communicate the progress of the founders they serve.

To learn more about Gutcheck.AI, visit gutcheckaiapp.com or connect with Corey Lipsey on LinkedIn.