‘This AI tool helped me define a target customer for my startup’

Jarrett Heflin, SM ’26, has helped build two companies — one without the help of artificial intelligence, and the other with AI. That firsthand experience has made Heflin a fan of the MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack, an AI tool developed by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

“Firing up JetPack for the first time was the fastest I’ve ever gone from a messy startup idea to a specific customer I could picture, interview, and build around,” Heflin said.

First priority: Establishing a beachhead market

From 2020 to 2024, Heflin was part of the team that developed and launched Ergatta, a premium rowing machine paired with embedded gaming content. 

To develop a customer case, the Ergatta team followed 24-step Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework championed by Trust Center founder Bill Aulet. “I got intrigued about the process: how you work backward from the customer and need to solve a solution for a beachhead market,” Heflin said. 

That experience led him to MIT Sloan, where he is now following the framework to build Spondi, a platform focused on helping people with severe autoimmune conditions manage their health. 

Heflin envisioned a conversational platform that could help newly diagnosed patients understand how their symptoms might respond to lifestyle factors such as exercise, nutrition, and sleep. 

The challenge was to narrow the population of people with autoimmune diseases down to a viable beachhead market — the initial base market that, once an entrepreneur has gained a dominant market share, allows them to then penetrate adjacent markets with different offerings.

Disciplined Entrepreneurship meets artificial intelligence

That’s where JetPack came in. Built on a large language model and trained on the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework, JetPack is designed to accelerate — not replace — founder decision-making. “It felt like someone had turned the Disciplined Entrepreneurship playbook into a co-founder who builds on my skill sets to uncover new hypotheses worth validating,” Heflin said.

Using the tool, which is part of MIT’s Orbit website for entrepreneurs, Heflin worked systematically through dozens of potential customer segments across autoimmune conditions, generating detailed profiles and evaluating how different groups might adopt, use, and share a product over time.

“JetPack helped me drill into the details that actually separate two seemingly similar customer segments,” he said. “Instead of stopping at broad labels like ‘autoimmune patients,’ it pushed me to get specific about mindset, routines, constraints, and how people discover and share tools.”

A guided deep dive into market segments

The process was iterative, he said, sharpening segment definitions with every pass. “[JetPack’s] value is that it builds with you,” Heflin said. “It made it obvious why two segments that look the same at a glance can behave very differently in adoption and word of mouth.”

While JetPack currently provides placeholder data on market size and spending, Heflin found that its real value lay in structuring what hypothesis to validate next.

“I started with a broad idea — ‘a way to track and manage autoimmune symptoms’ — and JetPack helped me break it into multiple plausible beachhead markets,” Heflin said. He dived deep into three or four of those markets, using the same iterative loop each time: 

• Build a concrete end-user picture.
• Stress-test what tools that segment uses today.
• Determine what would make them switch, who influences them, and whether they’d actively share a tool like Spondi. 

“When a segment’s ‘why now?’ or word-of-mouth story didn’t hold up, I’d tighten the definition and run another pass,” Heflin said. “In a quick series of focused sessions, I progressed further than I would have in weeks of manual trial and error. I could feel the difference, because I wasn’t committing days to the wrong market before realizing I’d hit a wall.”

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A targeted market ready to “cheer for the product” 

Through that process, Heflin was able to identify a highly specific beachhead market: former athletes newly diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a rare autoimmune condition affecting the spine and hips. 

“It’s devastating at first,” he said. “You pretty much can’t lift your head up until you go onto biologic medicines.”

What made the group compelling wasn’t just their diagnosis but their mindset. “They’re fighting to get back to their lives, their routine, and how they view themselves as athletes,” Heflin said. “They use exercise and activity as the centering part of their day.”

He intentionally chose a small market — roughly 115,000 to 125,000 people in the U.S. — that comprises individuals who are already seeking wellness tools.

“They’re buying Whoops. They’re buying Oura Rings,” Heflin said. “They’re really starting to understand and track their fitness and track their health. JetPack allowed us to go from a wider set of people with different autoimmune conditions to find one small subset who are really going to cheer for this product.”

An initial pass in 10 minutes

JetPack’s speed is what sticks most with Heflin. “It used to take an MIT student an entire semester to get through steps 1 to 24 in class,” he said. With the tool, entrepreneurs need as little as 10 minutes to take an initial pass through the framework — enough to surface hypotheses and structure next steps. 

“You can do a full pass quickly, validate in the real world, and then loop back in minutes. The more context you build over time, the better it performs,” said Heflin, who spent several focused sessions iterating, validating insights with customers, and looping back to refine assumptions.

Next steps

With his beachhead market fully described, Heflin is using JetPack to refine follow-on markets, structure customer interviews, and translate findings into minimal viable product requirements and positioning.

“The near-term plan is targeted customer discovery, then ship an MVP, then run a small pilot to measure adoption, retention, and outcomes,” Heflin said. “Longer term, I’ll use JetPack to decide when we’re ready to expand and which adjacent market to target next.” 

Read next: ‘This AI tool helped me choose the right market for my startup’

The MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack tools are currently being used by entrepreneurship students at MIT and being piloted outside the Institute; there is a waitlist that prospective users can join. 

JetPack is also available to participants in either of two MIT Sloan Executive Education courses: 

Entrepreneurship Development Program

Entrepreneurship Development Accelerator