my barber of 8 years became my biggest competitor after i taught him how to code with AI
okay so this is gonna sound crazy but bear with me.
i’m 21. self taught dev. been building AI stuff for about a year now. before that i was installing fire alarms.
my barber for the last 7-8 years is a guy named christian. cool dude. we’d talk shop every time i sat in his chair. one day i’m in there showing him claude code on my laptop, telling him how it changed my life, how i can build entire apps just by talking to it. i’m gassed up about it. i’m telling him like bro this is the future, anyone can build now, you should try it.
he tried it.
three months later he launches a competing AI service for barbershops. same vertical i was selling into. then he starts calling the shops i was already working with. undercuts me on price. tells them his thing is better. poaches three of my clients including the first one who ever paid me 100 bucks. dude i taught how to use the tool used the tool to take my customers.
i won’t lie that one hurt.
so i sat with it for a few days. got mad. got over it. and then i made a decision. i was done selling to barbershops.
if you can get poached by your own barber you’re in the wrong market.
i pivoted hard. stopped going after small service businesses. went after premium verticals. medical spas, dental, real estate, insurance. higher ticket, harder to poach, longer sales cycles but the customer actually has money to spend and a real problem to solve.
couple months later i meet a guy named jonathan. 20 year veteran in medicare insurance. been running an agency. we get on a call. he sees what i can build. i see what he knows about the industry. we shake hands on a 50/50 partnership in a new company. i build the product. he brings the industry knowledge and the network. we’re launching before AEP in october.
i went from charging 100 bucks for a barbershop voice bot to having equity in an insurance company with a real operator.
and i kept building my own thing too. it’s called conduit AI. think of it like a virtual business that runs itself. 32 AI employees across sales, marketing, ops, finance. you describe what you want done, the right “employee” picks it up and does it. we have video generation, image generation, voice agents, the whole stack. the goal is for someone non technical to wake up, tell their AI workforce what to do, and go live their life.
a few takeaways from the last 8 months in case any of this is useful:
teaching your competition is sometimes how you find out who you actually are. i was so excited to share the tool that i forgot the tool itself doesn’t make you a builder. i’m still building 8 months later. christian got 3 clients and i bet he hasn’t shipped anything new since.
the people who poach you are doing you a favor. they show you that your moat isn’t where you thought it was. real moats are relationships and speed of iteration. not features.
pivots aren’t failures. they’re you finally listening. i lost 4 clients in 60 days. that was the market telling me to move. i moved.
your network compounds faster than your code. one good partnership with a real operator is worth 100 cold leads. jonathan trusts me because i built fast and showed up consistent. that’s it. that’s the whole secret.
i’m not where i want to be. i’m walking around west palm beach right now staring at yachts in the marina and nobody walking past me has any idea what i’m building or what’s coming. and honestly i kind of like it that way. heads down. ship. let the work speak.
if anyone here is building solo and wants to talk shop my DMs are open. i learned most of what i know from people on reddit being generous with their time when i had no idea what i was doing. trying to pay it forward.