AI tools should do the boring work first

Arel Aslan — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 08:38:37 +0000

I spend most of my time building products for people who run online stores. My name is Arel Aslan. I am an entrepreneur, MBA and full-stack product builder based in Istanbul, and I founded Noian and Savalan AI.

Noian turns a Shopify store catalog into ready to post videos. Savalan AI is a business grounded AI assistant that answers from a company's own data. Both came from the same observation: the work founders put off is usually the repetitive work, and that is exactly the work AI handles best.

Three things I keep coming back to.

First, start from a real workflow, not from a model. A feature only matters if it removes a step someone does every day. When we built Noian, the starting point was a merchant opening a product page, copying details, and editing a video by hand. Removing that manual loop was the whole product.

Second, ship the simple version. A basic video with a clear voiceover and subtitles helps a store today. A perfect cinematic ad that takes a week to render does not. Simple output, delivered on time, beats ambitious output that never ships.

Third, keep a human in the loop. Our users approve content before it posts, because their brand is on the line. Automation should save time, not take away control.

If you are building AI products for small businesses, I would like to hear which repetitive work your users hand over first. You can connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arelaslan/

DEV Community: Arel Aslan

AI tools should do the boring work first