Interview: From Engineer to CEO — Building a Prompt-as-Product Startup

Interview: From Engineer to CEO — Building a Prompt-as-Product Startup

Hook: Turning prompt expertise into a product requires new skills: pricing, mentorship, team building, and navigating pre-seed economics in 2026.

Guest: Arun Sethi, founder & CEO

Arun built a prompt marketplace and raised pre-seed capital in late 2025. He’s candid about what worked and what didn’t.

Key lessons

• Mentorship matters: early mentors helped Arun shift from code focus to product decisions. He recommends reading strategic interviews with engineers who became CEOs (Interview: From Engineer to CEO).
• Pricing strategy: Arun used high-value trial packages and consulted guides on pricing high-ticket mentoring and services (How to Price High‑Ticket Mentoring Packages).
• Funding environment: pre-seed shifts favor teams that demonstrate unit economics and cloud-credit efficiency; read current market notes about where angels are betting (Market Update: Pre-Seed Shifts and Cloud Credits).

Operational advice from the founder

1. Ship a minimal prompt registry and instrument every call for metrics.
2. Create onboarding flows for prompt buyers and sellers using an onboarding checklist (The Ultimate Freelance Onboarding Checklist).
3. Lean on community economies — free job platforms and micro-communities can bootstrap your early marketplace (The Evolution of Free Job Platforms).

On mentorship and building culture

Arun emphasized ritual design for hybrid teams and acknowledgment patterns that help small teams scale asynchronously (Designing Rituals of Acknowledgment).

What’s next

Arun plans to integrate NFTs for provenance and micro-subscriptions for prompt authorship — a concept aligned with new reader engagement models that include NFT bookplates and global exchanges (New Models for Reader Engagement).

Author: Editorial Team — Interview conducted and edited by AIPrompts Cloud editorial staff.