aicofounder.com is now Buildpad

The short version

We launched Buildpad in August 2024. In the user calls that followed, people kept describing the product the same way: it felt like having an AI cofounder. We loved that. The term captured something real about the product, and we started using it ourselves.

A year later, in October 2025, we went all in. We bought aicofounder.com and rebranded the whole product around the term. At the time it felt like a bold move: become the original AI cofounder, own the category, and pick up the search traffic that comes with it.

Nine months later, we're back to Buildpad. Not because something went wrong with the product. Buildpad grew from around 20,000 users at the time of the rebrand to over 100,000 founders today. We're going back because we learned something about names.

The name problem

The friction started small. How do you even write the name? AICofounder? AI co-founder? aicofounder.com? We were inconsistent with it ourselves, and our users wrote it in every variation you can imagine. When your own team isn't sure how to write the company name, something is off.

At some point I was reflecting on this and had to be honest with myself: aicofounder.com was a problematic name. That was just the truth of it. I told Felix. He was hesitant at first, but I could see he felt it too. And both of us kept being drawn to the same place: our original name. Buildpad never stopped feeling like us. It felt right.

What we learned

Looking back, rebranding to a category term was a mistake, and we say that openly because it's a useful lesson for other founders. Category names look attractive: when someone hears "AI cofounder" they immediately understand roughly what the product does. But very few companies have made a generic term work as a brand. For everyone else, a category name means spending your energy on a name you can never really own, instead of building equity in one you can.

We could have spent those nine months building the Buildpad brand. That's the real cost, and it's why we didn't want to wait any longer to fix it.

The term "AI cofounder" isn't going anywhere, though. It's how our users described the product before we ever marketed it that way, and it's still the best description of the role the AI plays. The AI cofounder lives on Buildpad. The name of the company is Buildpad.

Where Buildpad came from

There's no grand story behind the name. When we started building the product it didn't have one; in the earliest code it was literally called "biz-builder". I was brainstorming names, landed on Buildpad, searched around to see if it was taken, and it wasn't. We both really liked it.

The 2025 rebrand was never about disliking Buildpad. It was a calculated move for a category and its search traffic. We've since far outgrown that traffic, and we believe in something better: building a brand that's actually ours.

What changes for you

Practically nothing. This is a cosmetic change. Your projects and data are exactly where you left them.

• aicofounder.com now redirects to buildpad.io, old links included.

• Websites you've published move from .aicofounder.co to .buildpad.site and redirect automatically. Custom domains are unaffected.

• Interview links redirect automatically too.

• Emails from us now come from hello@buildpad.io.

• You may need to sign in again the first time you visit buildpad.io.

Thank you for building with us, whatever we happened to be called at the time. Now we get back to work.