‘Claude killed my startup’: San Francisco founder explains how an AI feature made her ‘entire product category obsolete’

A San Francisco-based entrepreneur revealed how a single update to Anthropic’s Claude “killed” her startup. Despite having hundreds of paying clients and rapid growth, the founder watched her sales close rate plummet from 70% to just 20% overnight.San Francisco founder Ira Bodnar. (X/@irabukht)“I woke up today and Claude killed my startup. We got several hundred paying clients in 2 months, was growing like crazy. One Claude/Manus feature and our close rate dropped from 70% to 20%. Claude just made our entire product category obsolete,” Ryze co-founder Ira Bodnar wrote on X.Also Read: Who is Boris Cherny? Anthropic’s Claude Code creator warns AI may disrupt internet jobs“We built an AI agent that automates ad management for you. Like, you can give it access to all your Google and Meta accounts and it will manage it for you. Pretty cool. Customers loved it.”She further explained, “Claude and Manus both released connectors for Meta Ads. Claude still can’t make changes in ad accounts — it can only do analysis, and it has no access to Google Ads. But give it a few months, and it will. So building here feels pointless.”Will her startup survive?However, in the following lines, the entrepreneur shared that for now, her business would survive. “Our current business will be fine anyway. We knew what was coming and started actively pivoting a few weeks ago. Now we also build complex workflows for huge ad agencies managing 100s of accounts — like some of our clients manage 600 accounts with 6 people. Pretty insane.”Also Read: Meta AI safety researcher recalls moment OpenClaw agent deleted her emailsIn her post, she further discussed the changes AI is likely to bring to the marketing and dribution industries.How did social media react?An individual posted, “Good article. Have been working for a bit on selling to agents within B2B – would love to chat and share learnings/bounce ideas.” Another added, “I have lots of thoughts on how I am going to build similar tools that will perform better, and more proactively than what cowork could do in the advertising space.”A third commented, “It’s wild how fast Claude and Manus are shifting the landscape for ad management, Ira. You hit the nail on the head regarding the GTM stack. Brand and taste really do feel like the last moats when outreach automation becomes a commodity. I’m curious, as you pivot toward those complex workflows for large agencies, how are you positioning that human hustle and storytelling to win over those massive 600-account portfolios?”A fourth wrote, “So you used your tech as a wedge into orgs and now looking to build something differentiated… doesn’t sound like failure.”