Durable first launched as an AI website builder. Now, founder James Clift is positioning it as an end-to-end “AI business builder” designed to lower the barriers to entrepreneurship.
James Clift has sparked viral attention on X this week after claiming that his platform can “replace your 9-to-5 income” by building an entire business for you. He described the product as an “AI business builder” that collapses months of setup into minutes.
Originally founded in 2022 as an AI website builder, Clift has presented the new version of Durable as a way to shortcut the hardest parts of starting a service business. Through very basic prompting techniques, the product generates everything from a branded website to back-end business assets.
The startup also says it now layers in operational tools, such as SEO, client management systems, and revenue plans, so budding entrepreneurs can focus on big picture thinking instead of stitching together the complexities of multiple systems.
The founder behind the viral AI business builder
“Other companies are using AI to replace you,” Clift wrote in an announcement post on X. “Block just laid off 4,000 people and replaced with AI agents, Amazon cut 16,000 jobs [and] Meta is cutting 15,000 this week. We’re using AI to make you the business owner.”
Perhaps Clift’s public confidence comes from repetition. Before Durable, an online resume builder called VisualCV. On his personal site, he says VisualCV grew to 4 million users, reached “over 8 figures in revenue,” and was sold in 2020.
Those numbers are difficult to independently validate in full detail, but the core arc shows up consistently across Clift’s own bio and third-party profiles.
Durable is the next expression of that operator’s instinct to remove friction from a job people already want to do. Clift has described the problem in earlier interviews as the grind of getting a service business off the ground.
He’s also pointed specifically to solo operators, where the work isn’t the service itself, but everything surrounding it.
Durable’s shift from building websites to building businesses
In late 2022, BetaKit reported that Durable’s early ambition was to make starting and running a solo service business easier than working for someone else, quoting Clift’s view that it remained “way too hard” to start these companies.
Durable announced in December 2023 that it had secured an $14 million funding round, claiming that its platform had facilitated the creation of 6 million websites within about a year of launch. At the time, the news brought its total funding amount to around $20.25 million.
During the same period, Clift described the roadmap in “business-in-a-box” terms, intending to turn Durable into a platform that can build a complete, functional business end to end.
Today, that roadmap appears to be catching up to the messaging. This week’s release positions Durable, which first launched as an AI-powered website builder, as a platform that can now support founders with the operational pieces required to start – and run – a small business.
Whether Durable can really replace your 9-to-5 income in record time will, of course, depend on the level of execution far beyond generation. Even so, Clift’s trajectory serves as yet another signal that the practical barriers to entrepreneurship keep falling.
