Built by founders who've been on both sides of the table.

Andy Stewart has spent more than 30 years in entrepreneurship—as a founder, agency operator, and Managing Partner at a small VC firm, where he reviewed more than 500 startup pitches. The pattern he saw again and again: capable founders failed not because ideas were weak, but because they built before they validated.

Before StartupShortcut, Stewart was the first sales director at the Go BIG Network (now Startups.com and Fundable.com), working directly with hundreds of founders and investors. The founders who lasted had usually done the work to understand their market before writing code or buying ads.

He spent the following decade building Neural Marketer into a top-rated digital marketing agency serving Fortune 500 clients and managing millions in ad spend across Google and Meta—experience that informs how seriously StartupShortcut treats time, budget, and misplaced focus.

Stewart held the StartupShortcut domain for 14 years before turning it into a product. When he did, the concept was run through the same validation workflow the platform offers founders: a 19/25 score and a "Proceed with Caution" read. He chose to proceed because the data showed a real opportunity with manageable risk—the outcome the product is designed to help others reach.

StartupShortcut exists to give every founder and business owner the intelligence they need to make better decisions: AI that lowers the barriers that keep people on the sidelines. Moving the needle on startup failure rates and business growth—even modestly—is central to why the company was built.