I used to be an urban planner. Now I’m building an AI tool for early design decisions.
I used to work as an urban planner, and one problem stayed with me: people often need clear visuals before a design is developed enough for detailed rendering.
Text and diagrams can be too abstract, while producing polished visuals too early takes time. This gap also appears in interior, exterior, and landscape projects.
That led me to build ArchOne AI.
The idea is simple: upload a photo, sketch, or early render, then explore visual directions for materials, lighting, facades, planting, and spatial mood.
It is not meant to replace architects or designers. It is a concept layer for comparing ideas and improving early conversations before detailed drawings and technical decisions begin.
A few things I have learned so far:
- Generating a beautiful image is the easy part. Preserving walls, openings, site conditions, and project context is much harder.
- A focused workflow is more useful than a generic AI image generator.
- Positioning is difficult: professionals want control and credibility, while homeowners want simplicity.
The product is live at https://archoneai.com, and I’m now trying to decide which audience to prioritize first.
If you have built for both professionals and consumers, how did you choose your initial audience without making the positioning too broad?
The interesting tension here is that “early design decisions” can mean very different things depending on who is making them.
A professional may care about preserving constraints and credibility, while a homeowner may simply want to make an idea visible enough to react to.
That feels like a more consequential distinction than it first appears.
The point about preserving walls openings and the actual site instead of just making pretty images is what caught my attention. That's a much more real problem than another AI image tool.
It also feels like this could be getting a lot more organic traffic than it probably is right now. While you're still figuring out whether to focus on pros or homeowners that kind of momentum would be really valuable.
Have you had the same feeling yet or am I reading too much into it?