u/Warm-Reaction-456

My last few posts here did a couple 100k views combined and the most common question in my DMs since has been some version of "should I build a free tool to get users" In short, yes. Long answer…. almost everyone builds the wrong one.

Let me explain with the oldest trick in local business.

Carpet cleaners used to offer one room cleaned completely free. It probably sounds like they're giving away the product right? Well that’s wrong. Because the moment that one room is clean and spotless…. every other room in the house looks filthy by comparison. The homeowner didn't know they had a problem an hour ago but now they can't unsee it. The free cleaning of one room did not satisfy the customer. It actually made them want more.

That's what a free tool is supposed to do. Solve one NARROW problem completely…. and in doing so make the bigger problem your paid product solves impossible to ignore. I build MVPs for founders and free tools have quietly become half of my project requests this year. I have watched them become a founder's entire growth engine and I have watched them become a complete waste of a month. The difference is never the code.

Now here is where every SaaS founder makes a mistake. And I mean this literally…. the most common free tool request I get is "can you build a lite version of our product." That's not cleaning one room. That's cleaning the whole house for free and hoping they tip you. It doesn't reveal the problem it SOLVES it. Then the founder wonders why free users never upgrade…. because you already gave them everything, genius. A big part of my job  on these projects is talking the founder out of the lite version before we build anything.

After building a bunch of these, every free tool that actually converts falls into one of 3 buckets /groups.

Bucket one…. show them the dirt. Think about a diagnosis. You can offer an audit, a speed test, a calculator or a grader. You show them a number and a gap. For example you can say ,"Your site loads 30% slower than it should and here's roughly what that costs you a month." These approach work insanely well when the problem gets worse the longer they wait. I built this exact same thing for a founder with an SEO product…. free personalized audit, took the tool 30 seconds to generate but prospect thinks it took an hour. His cold outreach response rate went from 2% to 14% and it became his whole growth engine. The audit doesn't fix anything. It reveals what's broken. The paid product fixes it. These are also the fastest to build…. you're not building features, you're building a report.

Bucket two…. clean one room. You give full access to the real product but limit the USES not just the time. This matters a lot. A 14 day trial creates a countdown and pressure. A usage limit creates a habit. "First 10 reports free" beats "free for 14 days" because the person who runs 10 reports has built your product into their workflow. When they hit the wall they're not evaluating anymore…. they're already dependent. Implementation wise this is usually a pricing page change and a counter, not a rebuild. It works best when your SaaS solves a recurring problem.

Bucket three…. hand them step one. If getting the outcome takes 5 steps, give away step one completely free and genuinely good. A founder doing financial planning software could give away the budgeting template that actually works. It's real value. But doing step one manually reveals exactly how much time steps two through five will eat…. and your product does all 5 automatically. The free step sells the automation.

3 rules that decide whether your tool prints leads or collects dust.

Rule 1. It has to be good enough that you COULD charge for it. If your free tool is mediocre they don't think "imagine how good the paid stuff is." They think "this company makes mediocre stuff." The carpet cleaner's free room has to be SPOTLESS. A half cleaned room doesn't sell the house, rather it sells the competitor.

Rule 2. The name matters more than the tool. David Ogilvy said when you've written your headline you've spent 80 cents of your dollar. The SEO founder I mentioned…. his tool flopped for 2 months as "Free SEO Analyzer." We changed nothing except the name. We just changed the name to "Ranking Gap Report" and suddenly the same tool was converting. People don't want an analyzer but they want to know the gap between them and the guy outranking them. Test the name before you build anything. Two fake landing pages and 50 bucks of ads will tell you which tool to build before a single line of code gets written. I make founders do this now. It has killed more bad ideas than any amount of my advice ever did.

Rule 3. Make the next step stupid obvious. The tool runs, shows the result, and right there…. "want us to fix this for you?" One click. Most founders bury the upgrade path or worse, don't have one, because asking feels salesy. The carpet cleaner doesn't clean the free room and leave without a card. The entire point of the free room is the quote for the house.

Do this today. Write down the five problems your customer has to deal with BEFORE your product becomes the obvious answer. Choose the narrowest one you can solve completely with something that takes days to build, not months…. a “show them the dirt”  tool is genuinely a 1 to 2 week build for any competent dev, there's no excuse to sit on this for a quarter. Give it a name that says the outcome, not the category. Your customer will like "Churn Leak Finder" more than "Free Analytics Tool" every single time.

Traffic was never your problem. Lots of people walk through your house all day. They just can't see the dirt yet.

 

My last few posts here did a couple 100k views combined and the most common question in my DMs since has been some version of "should I build a free tool to get users" In short, yes. Long answer…. almost everyone builds the wrong one.

Let me explain with the oldest trick in local business.

Carpet cleaners used to offer one room cleaned completely free. It probably sounds like they're giving away the product right? Well that’s wrong. Because the moment that one room is clean and spotless…. every other room in the house looks filthy by comparison. The homeowner didn't know they had a problem an hour ago but now they can't unsee it. The free cleaning of one room did not satisfy the customer. It actually made them want more.

That's what a free tool is supposed to do. Solve one NARROW problem completely…. and in doing so make the bigger problem your paid product solves impossible to ignore. I build MVPs for founders and free tools have quietly become half of my project requests this year. I have watched them become a founder's entire growth engine and I have watched them become a complete waste of a month. The difference is never the code.

Now here is where every SaaS founder makes a mistake. And I mean this literally…. the most common free tool request I get is "can you build a lite version of our product." That's not cleaning one room. That's cleaning the whole house for free and hoping they tip you. It doesn't reveal the problem it SOLVES it. Then the founder wonders why free users never upgrade…. because you already gave them everything, genius. A big part of my job  on these projects is talking the founder out of the lite version before we build anything.

After building a bunch of these, every free tool that actually converts falls into one of 3 buckets /groups.

Bucket one…. show them the dirt. Think about a diagnosis. You can offer an audit, a speed test, a calculator or a grader. You show them a number and a gap. For example you can say ,"Your site loads 30% slower than it should and here's roughly what that costs you a month." These approach work insanely well when the problem gets worse the longer they wait. I built this exact same thing for a founder with an SEO product…. free personalized audit, took the tool 30 seconds to generate but prospect thinks it took an hour. His cold outreach response rate went from 2% to 14% and it became his whole growth engine. The audit doesn't fix anything. It reveals what's broken. The paid product fixes it. These are also the fastest to build…. you're not building features, you're building a report.

Bucket two…. clean one room. You give full access to the real product but limit the USES not just the time. This matters a lot. A 14 day trial creates a countdown and pressure. A usage limit creates a habit. "First 10 reports free" beats "free for 14 days" because the person who runs 10 reports has built your product into their workflow. When they hit the wall they're not evaluating anymore…. they're already dependent. Implementation wise this is usually a pricing page change and a counter, not a rebuild. It works best when your SaaS solves a recurring problem.

Bucket three…. hand them step one. If getting the outcome takes 5 steps, give away step one completely free and genuinely good. A founder doing financial planning software could give away the budgeting template that actually works. It's real value. But doing step one manually reveals exactly how much time steps two through five will eat…. and your product does all 5 automatically. The free step sells the automation.

3 rules that decide whether your tool prints leads or collects dust.

Rule 1. It has to be good enough that you COULD charge for it. If your free tool is mediocre they don't think "imagine how good the paid stuff is." They think "this company makes mediocre stuff." The carpet cleaner's free room has to be SPOTLESS. A half cleaned room doesn't sell the house, rather it sells the competitor.

Rule 2. The name matters more than the tool. David Ogilvy said when you've written your headline you've spent 80 cents of your dollar. The SEO founder I mentioned…. his tool flopped for 2 months as "Free SEO Analyzer." We changed nothing except the name. We just changed the name to "Ranking Gap Report" and suddenly the same tool was converting. People don't want an analyzer but they want to know the gap between them and the guy outranking them. Test the name before you build anything. Two fake landing pages and 50 bucks of ads will tell you which tool to build before a single line of code gets written. I make founders do this now. It has killed more bad ideas than any amount of my advice ever did.

Rule 3. Make the next step stupid obvious. The tool runs, shows the result, and right there…. "want us to fix this for you?" One click. Most founders bury the upgrade path or worse, don't have one, because asking feels salesy. The carpet cleaner doesn't clean the free room and leave without a card. The entire point of the free room is the quote for the house.

Do this today. Write down the five problems your customer has to deal with BEFORE your product becomes the obvious answer. Choose the narrowest one you can solve completely with something that takes days to build, not months…. a “show them the dirt”  tool is genuinely a 1 to 2 week build for any competent dev, there's no excuse to sit on this for a quarter. Give it a name that says the outcome, not the category. Your customer will like "Churn Leak Finder" more than "Free Analytics Tool" every single time.

Traffic was never your problem. Lots of people walk through your house all day. They just can't see the dirt yet.

 

This past year almost every project that lands on my desk has the same backstory "We vibe coded it, it was going great  and now we're stuck." I have been building SaaS MVPs for founders for 3 years …so let me explain what's actually happening because I'm tired of having this conversation one founder at a time.

Here's the pattern inside thousands of companies right now.

A dev (or the founder) prompts an AI and gets 2000 lines of code. He skims it then  ships it and then the whole process repeats.

Week 1 feels like cheating because features that took a month , now take a day.

But by month 6… Every new feature breaks two old ones. Not a single person on the team knows why the payment flow works and the AI that wrote it doesn't remember writing it.

The gap between week 1 and month 6 has a name…. TECHNICAL DEBT. Vibe coding didn't eliminate the cost of software. It just financed it.

Think about it through the value equation. Speed is one of the most valuable things on earth…. people pay fortunes to crush time delay and AI crushed it. But the effort didn't disappear. It just got deferred to future you with interest.

Here's the debt you're actually stacking.

Comprehension debt…. code exists that no human at your company understands. Because neither anyone wrote it nor did anyone read it. But somebody approved it.

Duplication debt…. AI doesn't refactor, it regenerates. Same logic in five places, five slightly different ways. One bug becomes five bugs.

Architecture debt…. every feature gets bolted on instead of built in. It works fine upto a certain limit… when you get to feature 20 or 30 the whole thing falls apart.

Security debt…. hardcoded keys, missing auth checks, injection holes shipped at record speed. This one doesn't cost you time but costs you the company.

Test debt…. no tests Or worse, AI written tests that pass no matter what.

And debt compounds… Lose just 5% of your velocity per sprint to unpaid debt and in six months you're shipping at HALF speed while paying full salaries.

Now the part where I answer the comments before you write them. Because I've had this exact argument enough times to know what's coming.

"You're just a dev gatekeeping because AI is eating your job." My guy I use AI on every single project. I ship faster than I have at any point in 3 years. This is not anti AI. It's anti skipping the parts of engineering that were never about typing speed in the first place. Reading, structuring, deciding…. that was always the job. Typing was the easy part.

"My vibe coded app has been running fine for months." Debt is invisible right up until it isn't. Your app working today tells you nothing about what happens when you try to CHANGE it. That's the whole trap. It's not week 6 that gets you. It's month 6, feature 30, the first big customer with a weird edge case.

"Just ask the AI to refactor it." The AI can't hold your whole codebase in its head. That's WHY you have five versions of the same logic…. it regenerates instead of refactors. Asking the thing that created the mess to clean the mess, with the same blind spots, is how the mess gets bigger with more confidence.

"Models keep getting better, this will solve itself." So the plan is to bet the company on a future model cleaning up the mess today's model made. That's not a strategy that's a prayer. And even if the model gets 10x better…. it still can't recover the context of WHY decisions were made when no human made them.

"Tech debt existed way before AI, nothing new here." True. But a junior dev writes maybe 200 questionable lines a day and a senior catches most of it in review. AI writes 2000 lines a minute and they get approved by someone who skimmed. Same disease. 100x the dose. The problem was never that debt exists. It's the RATE you're taking it on without noticing.

"Who cares about clean code if the product makes money." Ask the founder whose checkout broke on a Friday night and the team spent the whole weekend staring at code none of them understood. Revenue stops caring about your shipping speed real quick when the thing that COLLECTS the revenue is down. I have gotten that panic call more than once. It's never fun and it's never cheap.

"This is just bad prompting, skill issue." Partially fair. Better prompting produces better code. But prompting skill doesn't fix the core issue…. nobody is reading the output. You can't prompt your way out of a review problem.

The answer isn't stop using AI. That's like getting out of debt by refusing to touch money. The answer is servicing the loan.

Review AI code like a junior engineer wrote it. Because functionally one did.

Nothing merges without a test a human actually read.

20% of every sprint goes to paying down debt. Not "when things slow down" Things never slow down.

You draw the blueprint and AI builds the rooms. Never the other way around.

Vibe code the prototype. Don't vibe code the company.

Speed is a loan. Take it…. just read the terms first.

Everyone out there is throwing around the term "AI agent" right now and most explanations are either pure hype or pure jargon. Here is a simplified explanation  from someone who actually builds these stuffs :)

In simple words, A chatbot gives you an answer and an agent does the thing.

ChatGPT style AI is like a really smart consultant. You ask something, it gives an answer and then it sits there waiting for your next question. It still depends on you for every step.

An agent is more like an employee. You give it a goal instead of a question and it figures out how to do it , does the work,  checks to make sure everything is okay and keeps going until the job is all done

Here is a simple test…. a chatbot can tell you how to follow up with a lead. An agent can actually send the follow up, writes down the response and books the meeting on your calendar.

Now here's what's actually going on behind the scenes, because once you understand how things work…you stop falling for the hype.

An agent is really just a language model with a few extra things added to it.

Number one is tools. This is what makes a difference. On its own an LLM can only produce text but tools give it ability to do things. A tool is basically permission to take a real action like sending an email, reading your calendar, updating a row in your CRM, searching the web, running a payment. When people say an agent did something…what actually happened is the model decided which tool to use, filled in the details, and then the tool executed it. If you do not have tools you do not have an agent.. It's just a chatbot with confidence.

Number two…. memory. A raw model forgets everything the second the conversation ends. Agents have two kinds of memory strapped on. Short term memory is the running context of the current task…. what it's done so far, what worked and what failed. Long term memory is stored outside the model, usually a database it can write to and search later. That's how an agent remembers that a specific customer already complained twice, or that you prefer meetings after 2pm. Without memory every task starts from zero and the agent is useless for anything ongoing.

Three…. the loop. This is the part almost no one explains. An agent runs on a cycle…. it plans what to do, acts on that plan, checks what happens and adjusts its next step. It breaks your goal into smaller steps, tries the first step, looks at the result, and decides what to do next based on what actually happened. If a step fails it retries or takes another route instead of just stopping. This cycle is what makes the difference between an intelligence system that just talks and the one that actually works . A chatbot runs the loop only once but an agent runs it until the job is done.

That's all to it. A model, some tools, a memory and a cycle that keeps running. Everything else is marketing.

Where this actually matters for a normal business…. lead follow up is the biggest one. Most businesses take hours or days to respond to an inquiry. Whereas an agent responds in just minutes, every single time, even at  2am on a Sunday. When you take long to follow up it can be a big hidden loss of money for your business. Apart from that…. the same 20 support questions that make up 80% of your tickets, and the boring admin like invoicing, reminders, and chasing unpaid bills.

Lemme explain the math. If an employee spends 10 hours a week on copy paste work at 25 bucks  an hour that's 13k bucks a year spent on tasks that follow the same steps every single time. That's what agents are made for. And there's a second effect that people miss. Customers don't just pay for the result…. they pay for how fast and how easy it is to get. Anything that cuts time and effort out of your delivery makes what you sell MORE valuable and cuts your costs at the same time. Most investments don't do both.

The honest truth…. agents are not magic. If your goals are not clear you get vague results. The loop can go sideways, so you still want a human reviewing anything important, especially early on.  The businesses that are actually winning with this aren't automating everything. They pick ONE repetitive rule based task, get an agent doing it reliably, then move to the next one.

If you're wondering where to start…. write down every task your team does more than 10 times a week that follows roughly the same steps. That list is your plan for automation.

Everyone out there is throwing around the term "AI agent" right now and most explanations are either pure hype or pure jargon. Here is a simplified explaination  from someone who actually builds these stuffs :)

In simple words, A chatbot gives you an answer and an agent does the thing.

ChatGPT style AI is like a really smart consultant. You ask something, it gives an answer and then it sits there waiting for your next question. It still depends on you for every step.

An agent is more like an employee. You give it a goal instead of a question and it figures out how to do it , does the work,  checks to make sure everything is okay and keeps going until the job is all done

Here is a simple test…. a chatbot can tell you how to follow up with a lead. An agent can actually send the follow up, writes down the response and books the meeting on your calendar.

Now here's what's actually going on behind the scenes, because once you understand how things work…you stop falling for the hype.

An agent is really just a language model with a few extra things added to it.

Number one is tools. This is what makes a difference. On its own an LLM can only produce text but tools give it ability to do things. A tool is basically permission to take a real action like sending an email, reading your calendar, updating a row in your CRM, searching the web, running a payment. When people say an agent did something…what actually happened is the model decided which tool to use, filled in the details, and then the tool executed it. If you do not have tools you do not have an agent.. It's just a chatbot with confidence.

Number two…. memory. A raw model forgets everything the second the conversation ends. Agents have two kinds of memory strapped on. Short term memory is the running context of the current task…. what it's done so far, what worked and what failed. Long term memory is stored outside the model, usually a database it can write to and search later. That's how an agent remembers that a specific customer already complained twice, or that you prefer meetings after 2pm. Without memory every task starts from zero and the agent is useless for anything ongoing.

Three…. the loop. This is the part almost no one explains. An agent runs on a cycle…. it plans what to do, acts on that plan, checks what happens and adjusts its next step. It breaks your goal into smaller steps, tries the first step, looks at the result, and decides what to do next based on what actually happened. If a step fails it retries or takes another route instead of just stopping. This cycle is what makes the difference between an intelligence system that just talks and the one that actually works . A chatbot runs the loop only once but an agent runs it until the job is done.

That's all to it. A model, some tools, a memory and a cycle that keeps running. Everything else is just marketing.

Where this actually matters for a normal business…. lead follow up is the biggest one. Most businesses take hours or days to respond to an inquiry. Whereas an agent responds in just minutes, every single time, even at  2am on a Sunday. When you take long to follow up it can be a big hidden loss of money for your business. Apart from that…. the same 20 support questions that make up 80% of your tickets, and the boring admin like invoicing, reminders, and chasing unpaid bills.

Lemme explain the math. If an employee spends 10 hours a week on copy paste work at 25 bucks  an hour that's 13k bucks a year spent on tasks that follow the same steps every single time. That's what agents are made for. And there's a second effect that people miss. Customers don't just pay for the result…. they pay for how fast and how easy it is to get. Anything that cuts time and effort out of your delivery makes what you sell MORE valuable and cuts your costs at the same time. Most investments don't do both.

The honest truth…. agents are not magic. If your goals are not clear you get vague results. The loop can go sideways, so you still want a human reviewing anything important, especially early on.  The businesses that are actually winning with this aren't automating everything. They pick ONE repetitive rule based task, get an agent doing it reliably, then move to the next one.

If you're wondering where to start…. write down every task your team does more than 10 times a week that follows roughly the same steps. That list is your plan for automation.

Everyone out there is throwing around the term "AI agent" right now and most explanations are either pure hype or pure jargon. Here is a simplified explaination  from someone who actually builds these stuffs :)

In simple words, A chatbot gives you an answer and an agent does the thing.

ChatGPT style AI is like a really smart consultant. You ask something, it gives an answer and then it sits there waiting for your next question. It still depends on you for every step.

An agent is more like an employee. You give it a goal instead of a question and it figures out how to do it , does the work,  checks to make sure everything is okay and keeps going until the job is all done

Here is a simple test…. a chatbot can tell you how to follow up with a lead. An agent can actually send the follow up, writes down the response and books the meeting on your calendar.

Now here's what's actually going on behind the scenes, because once you understand how things work…you stop falling for the hype.

An agent is really just a language model with a few extra things added to it.

Number one is tools. This is what makes a difference. On its own an LLM can only produce text but tools give it ability to do things. A tool is basically permission to take a real action like sending an email, reading your calendar, updating a row in your CRM, searching the web, running a payment. When people say an agent did something…what actually happened is the model decided which tool to use, filled in the details, and then the tool executed it. If you do not have tools you do not have an agent.. It's just a chatbot with confidence.

Number two…. memory. A raw model forgets everything the second the conversation ends. Agents have two kinds of memory strapped on. Short term memory is the running context of the current task…. what it's done so far, what worked and what failed. Long term memory is stored outside the model, usually a database it can write to and search later. That's how an agent remembers that a specific customer already complained twice, or that you prefer meetings after 2pm. Without memory every task starts from zero and the agent is useless for anything ongoing.

Three…. the loop. This is the part almost no one explains. An agent runs on a cycle…. it plans what to do, acts on that plan, checks what happens and adjusts its next step. It breaks your goal into smaller steps, tries the first step, looks at the result, and decides what to do next based on what actually happened. If a step fails it retries or takes another route instead of just stopping. This cycle is what makes the difference between an intelligence system that just talks and the one that actually works . A chatbot runs the loop only once but an agent runs it until the job is done.

That's all to it. A model, some tools, a memory and a cycle that keeps running. Everything else is marketing.

Where this actually matters for a normal business…. lead follow up is the biggest one. Most businesses take hours or days to respond to an inquiry. Whereas an agent responds in just minutes, every single time, even at  2am on a Sunday. When you take long to follow up it can be a big hidden loss of money for your business. Apart from that…. the same 20 support questions that make up 80% of your tickets, and the boring admin like invoicing, reminders, and chasing unpaid bills.

Lemme explain the math. If an employee spends 10 hours a week on copy paste work at 25 bucks  an hour that's 13k bucks a year spent on tasks that follow the same steps every single time. That's what agents are made for. And there's a second effect that people miss. Customers don't just pay for the result…. they pay for how fast and how easy it is to get. Anything that cuts time and effort out of your delivery makes what you sell MORE valuable and cuts your costs at the same time. Most investments don't do both.

The honest truth…. agents are not magic. If your goals are not clear you get vague results. The loop can go sideways, so you still want a human reviewing anything important, especially early on.  The businesses that are actually winning with this aren't automating everything. They pick ONE repetitive rule based task, get an agent doing it reliably, then move to the next one.

If you're wondering where to start…. write down every task your team does more than 10 times a week that follows roughly the same steps. That list is your plan for automation.

Part 1 of this hit 253k views and 300+ upvotes(+ negative comments…ofc reddit it is) and Part 2 did 26k+ and the comments were actually positive .

 Multiple people said they learned more from those two posts than years in SaaS which honestly made my week, But a TON of you DMed me the same question…"Okay I fixed my offer and my money model but how do I actually get customers?" So this post is about that.

If you have not read the first two…chap you better go read them first because this one builds on them :)

This post assumes you already have a solid offer for a specific niche and your 30 day cash model actually works. If you're still charging 19 bucks a month to everyone with a pulse, better go fix that first.

Alright…. now  leads.

There are only 4 ways to get customers. I'm not being dramatic guys I mean this literally. 8 years of building MVPs for founders and watching what happens after launch…. every growth hack, every trick, every "secret" eventually maps back to one of four things. Before I start, I would like to credit Alex Hormozi for the framework, he calls it the Core Four. I have just seen it happen in SaaS over and over, from the people who are building it.

Point number one…. warm outreach. Reaching out one on one to people who already know you exist(Friends, former coworkers, LinkedIn connections, twitter mutuals, old clients) or anyone who has heard your name before... Just send them a personal message like a normal human and not some announcement blasted to everyone at once.

Most founders skip this completely because it feels "unscalable" and they want to jump straight to paid ads or going  viral. That my friend, is a mistake. Warm outreach is how you get your first 5 to 10 customers. It is how you get your case studies. It is how you get the proof that makes everything else work. Remember the Value Equation from Part 2? Perceived likelihood is near zero when you have no proof. Warm outreach is how you GET the proof.

When clients come to me for an MVP the first thing I ask is not about features. It is "who are the first 10 people you're going to message when this goes live" The ones who have an answer make money in one week and the ones who say , we'll figure out marketing after launch, are the ones I hear from 6 months later asking if the product needs a redesign. It NEVER needed a redesign.

Here is what I want you to do... Take out your phone, go to your contacts list, now open LinkedIn… Also open your email. Just count how many people are there. I'm sure you'll find over 500 people. A lot of you probably have more than 1k contacts. You know you're sitting on an opportunity but you're simply not using it. This is because you think sending emails to people you don't know will work better, than messaging people who already know and trust you… Honestly it won't.

The script is very simple. "Hey \[name\] I just built something that helps \[specific person\] do \[specific outcome\]. Do you know anyone who might be interested?" That is it. You are not even selling them directly. You're asking for referrals which feels way less weird for everyone. 1 in 5 will either be interested themselves or know someone who is. Do this 100 times and you get 20 conversations. Close 5 and you have your first paying customers AND your first case studies.

Two…. post free content(One to many communication). You post on platforms where your niche hangs out for instance, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, wherever.

Here is where founders mess this up completely. They post about their PRODUCT. "We just shipped dark mode!" "Version 2.3 is live!" NO ONE CARES. People do not get out of bed feeling excited about the changes you made to your software.

You should post about the PROBLEM you solved  instead. Share the frameworks, the math and the results with them. Teach them something useful for free. That is literally what these 3 posts are…. I haven't pitched anything once and my DMs have been flooded since yesterday  with founders asking questions. Some of those conversations turn into work and I didn't chase a single one of them. That is not an accident that is how content works. Give away real value and people come to you.

The key with content is consistency NOT virality. Going viral is a lottery ticket (trust me I didn't plan for part 1 to do 253k views). Posting valuable stuff  5 times a week for 6 months is a guarantee. It compounds eventually. First month feels like screaming into the void. By month three you start getting replies. By month 6 people are DMing you asking how to work with you. The founders who quit after 3 weeks because they got 4 likes are the same ones complaining they can't get customers.

Point no. three…. cold outreach. Cold outreach is like trying to start a conversation with someone you have never met. Cold emails, cold DMs, cold calls are all examples of it. The advanced cousin of warm outreach minus the trust.

And that's one big problem…. strangers don't trust you. So you lead with something so valuable they can't ignore. Not "hey want a demo of our tool" they’ll delete it instantly. You need big fast value. Solve a real problem for them BEFORE you ask for anything.

One founder I built for does SEO tooling. Instead of cold emailing "want to try our SEO tool" he sends a free personalized audit of the prospect's actual website with real recommendations. It takes his tool 30 seconds to generate but the prospect thinks he spent an hour on it. The response rate went from 2% to 14% overnight. Same product but different approach. We built the audit generator into the MVP specifically for this play and it became his whole growth engine.

For cold outreach you need 3 things. A targeted list of exactly the right people (scrape with software, buy from a broker, or manually pull from communities). A message that leads with massive value and not a pitch. And most importantly, volume. This is a numbers game… atleast 100 a day minimum. If you're sending 10 and wondering why nothing happens…. that's why.

Four…. paid ads. You pay platforms to show your message to targeted strangers. Fastest way to scale but also the fastest way to burn money if your offer and money model aren't dialed.

DO NOT start here. I know everyone wants to because it feels like "real business" It's not. If your offer isn't proven through outreach first you are paying to test something you could have tested for free. I have watched founders burn 10, 20, 50 thousand on ads before realizing the offer was the problem not the targeting. Some of them came to me afterwards to rebuild and the first thing we fixed was never the product.

Honestly the sequence matters… Warm outreach first for proof and case studies then content to grow your audience and then cold outreach to reach strangers at scale. THEN paid ads…. because now you have proof, testimonials, a conversion rate you can predict, and a money model that makes the math work.

Now the part that changes everything…. More Better New.

Once ONE of the four is working you scale it with three levers in this order.

More means do more of what already works. Cold emails getting customers at 100 a day? Send 300. Content working at 3 posts a week? Post daily. Founders constantly think they've "tapped out" a channel when they're nowhere close. Talked to a SaaS founder doing 2 million a year who thought he saturated his niche spending 5k a month on ONE platform. His niche is a 15 billion dollar industry. I’m like come on man.. Do more.

Better means improve what you're doing. 3% response rate on cold email? Test subject lines, test the value offer, test targeting. Content flopping? Study what pops in your niche and reverse engineer it. Better is optimization not invention.

New means new platform or new method. Cold email works? Add LinkedIn DMs... Twitter works? Try YouTube. But only go New AFTER maxing out More and Better. Most founders jump to New because they're bored. Boredom is not a strategy.

Last but not the least…. Once you max out what you can personally do there are four ways to get OTHER people generating leads for you. Customer referrals…. systematize word of mouth so customers bring customers. Employees…. hire people to run the Core Four for you. Agencies…. outsource to specialists. Affiliates…. other businesses send you customers for a cut. That's how you go from doing everything yourself to a machine that runs without you.

But honestly if you don't have 20 paying customers yet forget the machine stuff. Just do warm outreach TODAY. Message 10 people you know and ask if they know anyone with the problem you solve. That is the whole move.

The founders winning right now are not the ones with the best ads or the biggest following. They're the ones who sent the message, posted the content, and did it again tomorrow. Every day for months. While everyone else was adding features and wondering why nothing was happening.

Here are the previous 2 posts (incase anyone wants to go through them)

Part 1

Part 2

Okay so part 1 blew up way more than I expected. If you missed it the short version is…. after years of building SaaS MVPs I keep seeing the same three things kill founders. They sell to everyone, their offer is a commodity, and they have no money model. A bunch of you asked me to break down the actual fixes so here we go. This time with real math.

First things first…. pick a starving crowd.

Everyone and their mom says niche down but not a single person actually tells you what makes a niche worth going after. There are three things that matter. Massive pain, purchasing power, and easy to target. You need ALL three or it falls apart. A buddy of mine built a really solid resume optimization tool for job seekers. The product was genuinely good. Could not get a single person to pay for it. Why? His entire audience was unemployed. They had massive pain sure but zero purchasing power. Dead on arrival. Didn't matter how good the product was.

Before I write a single line of code for any founder now I make them fill in one sentence. "I help [specific person] get [specific outcome] without [specific thing they dread]." If you can't fill that in with precision you don't have a niche yet.

Bad version: "I help businesses manage projects better." That is nothing. That is competing with Asana on price and you WILL lose.

Better version: "I help residential renovation contractors close 40% more jobs without hiring a sales team." Same core software…. wildly different business. The second one can charge 500$ a month because the outcome is tied directly to revenue. No one is comparing that to Asana.

Do this today. Look at your last 10 customers. Find the ones who got the most value and stayed the longest and complained the least. I guarantee they cluster around a specific type of person. That IS your niche. Go talk to 10 more people exactly like them and ask what keeps them up at night. Build everything around that answer.

Point number two…. stop being a commodity using the Value Equation.

This one framework changed how I build and position everything. Credit to Alex Hormozi for this. Value has four parts. Dream Outcome times Perceived Likelihood of Achievement…. divided by Time Delay times Effort and Sacrifice. You want the top two as high as possible and the bottom two as close to zero as possible.

Most SaaS founders ONLY focus on dream outcome. They add features, make bigger promises, slap AI on everything. But the real leverage is in the bottom of the equation and almost no one touches it.

Perceived likelihood…. this is how much the prospect actually believes your thing will work for THEM. You launched two weeks ago. You have no case studies. No screenshots. No testimonials. Zero proof that it works for someone like them. Why would they believe you? They wouldn't. And they don't. That is why they bounce after looking at your landing page for 8 seconds. The fix is not more features. It is more proof. Get 5 people using it for free if you have to and document every single result obsessively. One real case study from someone in your niche is worth more than your entire feature roadmap combined.

Time delay…. this is how long it takes them to see any value after they sign up. Most SaaS onboarding is genuinely horrible. User signs up, lands on a dashboard with 47 options, has no idea what to click first, and churns in a week. I build every MVP now with what I call a day one win. Before the user does anything else the product should deliver one small but real result within 24 hours. A report generated, a lead found, a task automated…. something they can point at and say okay this thing actually works. If your time to first value is measured in weeks your churn will eat you alive.

Effort and sacrifice…. this is what they have to endure to get the result. Data migration, learning a new interface, training their team, changing their workflow. Every single one of these is friction and every friction point is a reason to quit or never start in the first place. The most valuable thing you can do is NOT add a feature. It is remove a step. Done for you onboarding beats do it yourself every single time. And you can charge more for it which feeds directly into fix three.

Here is the thing that took me years to actually understand. Apple, Amazon, Netflix…. these companies did NOT win by making bigger promises. They won by making the bottom of the equation approach zero. Instant. Seamless. Effortless. If the bottom is zero the value becomes essentially infinite no matter how modest the top is. That is how you stop being a commodity. Not with more features.

Do this today. List every single thing a customer has to do between seeing your landing page and getting their first result. Every click, every form, every upload, every wait. Then cut that list in half. THAT is your real product roadmap.

Third…. the 30 day cash model. This is the one that will actually save your business.

Pay attention because this is the math that separates SaaS companies that scale from ones that slowly bleed out while the MRR dashboard says everything is fine.

Your SaaS charges 49$ a month. Costs 5$ to serve each customer. That is 44$ gross profit per month. Average customer stays 10 months. Lifetime gross profit is 440$. Cost to acquire a customer through ads is 150$. Ratio is 2.93 to 1. Looks pretty good right? Almost the magic 3 to 1 number everyone talks about.

Here is the problem that most people in this sub never even think about. You spent 150$ to get that customer on day one. You only collected 44$ in month one. You are NEGATIVE 106$ on every single new customer for the first month. You do not break even until month four. And every new signup you get digs the cash hole deeper before it starts filling back up. This is why you think you "can't afford ads." Your ads work fine. Your money model does not.

The fix…. make more from each customer in the first 30 days than it costs to get and serve them.

Play one. Annual commitment with a waived fee. You give people two options. Month to month with a setup fee or commit to a year and the fee gets waived. I price the setup fee at 1.5 to 3x the monthly rate. So if you charge 49$ a month the setup fee is 75$ to 150$ for monthly users. Most people HATE fees so they go annual to avoid it. Annual at 49$ a month is 588$ collected on day one from those customers. Monthly with the fee is 124$ to 199$ day one. Either way your 30 day cash jumps dramatically compared to a naked 49$.

Play two. Day one upsell. Right after they buy…. offer something that makes the product work faster. A done for you setup, a strategy call, a premium config, a data migration service. Price it 100$ to 500$. You do not need everyone to take it. If one in five takes a 200$ upsell that is 40$ average added per customer. The average across all customers is what matters.

Play three. A guarantee that actually closes deals instead of costing you money. Most SaaS founders either have no guarantee or they do a weak 14 day free trial. Both are terrible. Free trials give you zero cash while the customer forgets they even signed up. Instead I use a conditional guarantee tied to outcomes. "You won't get billed again until you see your first [measurable result]." This does three things at once. It shifts risk off the buyer completely. It forces your team to focus on getting them activated fast. And it signals so much confidence that the prospect thinks…. if they are willing to not charge me until I get results this thing must actually work. Conversions go way up and barely anyone claims it because the condition requires them to USE the product which means they get results which means they stay.

Now let's redo the math. Base month one gross profit is 44$. Average upsell per customer is 40$. That is 84$ on monthly users. Now 30% of your signups go annual at 588$ day one. Blended 30 day cash across all customers jumps way past your 150$ CAC. Every new customer now funds the next one. THAT is the flywheel. That is how you scale without outside funding and without praying for organic virality.

Quick note on pricing because I know someone is going to comment "my competitors charge 19$ I can't charge more." Yes you can. You just need to sell to a different customer. If your competitors charge 19$ for a generic tool and you charge 200$ for a specialized tool with done for you onboarding and a results guarantee…. you are NOT competing with them. You are in a completely different category. Trust me the worst clients are the ones who pay the least and complain the most. Premium pricing attracts better clients, creates better outcomes, and gives you more profit to reinvest into making the product even better. Cheap pricing does the exact opposite. It is a death spiral.

Do this today. Calculate your 30 day cash per customer. Not LTV. Not projected MRR. Actual cash that hits your account within 30 days of each signup. If that number is less than your CAC your business is on a timer and you might not even know it. The easiest play to implement RIGHT NOW is the waived fee with annual commitment. You can set that up on your pricing page in an afternoon. Do it today and track it for 30 days.

That is the whole playbook. Starving crowd, Value Equation, 30 day cash model. Same three frameworks across hundreds of MVPs. They work in every niche at every price point. The founders who get this right spend their time growing. The ones who skip it keep adding features and wondering why nothing changes.

If you made it this far you already know more than most. Pick one fix. Ship it this week.

Part 3

Most businesses that come to me wanting an AI agent don't have an AI problem…They actually have an offer problem.

I work on building  AI agents and automations and I have been doing this for 3 years now. My work includes building chatbots, setting up sequences that reach out to people & I also do lead qualification and work on voice agents.  A guy approached  me last month. He runs a marketing agency and charges $1,500 per month retainer. Almost closes about 15% of his sales calls. He wanted me to build an AI agent that qualifies leads, books calls 24/7 and follows up automatically.

I asked him one question... What happens after they get on the call? He was mum for a sec

His offer was the same old "we run your ads" package that 40,000 other agencies sell. Neither any guarantee nor risk reversal. Nothing that makes a prospect feel stupid saying no.

So I told him the truth. I can 3x the calls on your calendar but if your close rate stays at 15% because your offer is mid you just paid me to fill a leaky bucket faster.

Here's the math…. Right now he books 20 calls a month and closes 3, that's $4500 in new MRR. I build the agent, he gets 60 calls, but they are colder leads with less trust because a bot qualified them and hence the

close rate drops to 8%. That's literally 4.8 clients. He went from $4500 to $7200. He tripled his pipeline for a 60% bump. It  sounds fine until you consider in my fee, the tech stack costs, and his team doing 3x the calls. Profit might actually be lower.

Now what if he fixes the offer first... He makes 20 calls. He changes the pricing adds a guarantee and adds some bonuses that do not cost him anything to deliver , names it something specific instead of "agency services." This way the close rate goes up to 40%. He closes 8 clients at $3000 because a better offer commands a higher price. This means he gets 24k dollars a month from the 20 calls.

Then you add the AI agent. Now he is really making something that already works better. Automation is like a multiplier.. if you use a multiplier with zero it is still zero.

I have got a whole framework for how I audit a business before I build anything. I ask my clients 3 questions, and a real case study where the same exact bot went from 6 sales to 19 sales in one month just by changing the offer underneath it Everything else stayed the same… Same bot ,same audience and same platform.

If people are interested in this I'll drop part 2 with the full breakdown and the three questions I use to decide whether a business is even ready for an AI agent or not.

 

I'm gonna say something that'll definitely piss off the peeps out there in this subreddit. Your product is not your problem INFACT your product has never been your problem. Vibe coding just made that 100x more obvious.

Its been my job to build SaaS MVPs for a while now… For funded startups, for solo founders maxing out credit cards, for guys who quit their jobs on a Friday and needed something live by Monday. I have seen what makes money and what dies quietly while the founder keeps tweeting "exciting update coming soon".  Every week I talk to founders who spent a weekend prompting their way to a working app. They are pretty excited and the app works, it looks decent then they launch it and then nothing happens. So they decide to add in some more features… They add more AI, dark mode, a dashboard. An integration nobody asked for .Still nothing happens. The founders come to me and say, I think I need to build it properly this time.. Maybe the UI needs to be improved.

Trust me YOU don't.  I have seen beautifully architected products make $0 and absolute spaghetti code disasters do $80k MRR. The difference was never the tech stack.

After working on MVPs I have found out what is actually hurting most of you. There are 3 things and they are listed below.

First things first….you are trying to sell to anyone. You say things like "we help businesses automate their work". That is what Zapier and many other apps do. I have made the product twice once for a general audience and once for a very specific group of people. The version for the group sold 22 times more than the general one. You can charge 100 times more for the product if you make it for a specific group.. People do not want to hear this because they think they will lose money if they focus on a small group. You're just leaving noise on the table.

Point number two is that, what you are offering is not unique. You are charging 29 dollars per month for something that looks the same as 40 other tools. The person looking at your product will compare it to others and then choose the cheapest one and you will lose. This is not a problem with how you're selling it it is a problem with what you are offering. Most founders make a product that does what they want. People do not think it will work so they do not buy it. The best companies make things easy to use. They do not require a lot of effort. Your product does not do that.

Third, you do not have a plan for making money. You make 44$ in the month but it costs 150$ to get a new customer. You wonder why you cannot afford to advertise. Your monthly revenue looks good but you are actually losing money. Every new customer makes you lose money before they start paying for your product. You think the answer is to add features.

I'll break down the exact fixes for all three in a Part 2 if people actually want it. The frameworks, the math, the specific plays I run on every MVP launch now that changed everything. Happy to go deep on the value equation, the 30 day cash model, and how to structure an offer so good people feel stupid saying no. Let me know if that's useful or if I should just go back to writing code.

Edit - Part 2

I'm gonna say something that'll definitely piss off the peeps out there in this subreddit. Your product is not your problem INFACT your product has never been your problem. Vibe coding just made that 100x more obvious.

Its been my job to build SaaS MVPs for a while now… For funded startups, for solo founders maxing out credit cards, for guys who quit their jobs on a Friday and needed something live by Monday. I have seen what makes money and what dies quietly while the founder keeps tweeting "exciting update coming soon".  Every week I talk to founders who spent a weekend prompting their way to a working app. They are pretty excited and the app works, it looks decent then they launch it and then nothing happens. So they decide to add in some more features… They add more AI, dark mode, a dashboard. An integration nobody asked for .Still nothing happens. The founders come to me and say, I think I need to build it properly this time.. Maybe the UI needs to be improved.

Trust me YOU don't.  I have seen beautifully architected products make $0 and absolute spaghetti code disasters do $80k MRR. The difference was never the tech stack.

After working on MVPs I have found out what is actually hurting most of you. There are 3 things and they are listed below.

First things first….you are trying to sell to anyone. You say things like "we help businesses automate their work". That is what Zapier and many other apps do. I have made the product twice once for a general audience and once for a very specific group of people. The version for the group sold 22 times more than the general one. You can charge 100 times more for the product if you make it for a specific group.. People do not want to hear this because they think they will lose money if they focus on a small group. You're just leaving noise on the table.

Point number two is that, what you are offering is not unique. You are charging 29 dollars per month for something that looks the same as 40 other tools. The person looking at your product will compare it to others and then choose the cheapest one and you will lose. This is not a problem with how you're selling it it is a problem with what you are offering. Most founders make a product that does what they want. People do not think it will work so they do not buy it. The best companies make things easy to use. They do not require a lot of effort. Your product does not do that.

Third, you do not have a plan for making money. You make 44$ in the month but it costs 150$ to get a new customer. You wonder why you cannot afford to advertise. Your monthly revenue looks good but you are actually losing money. Every new customer makes you lose money before they start paying for your product. You think the answer is to add features.

I'll break down the exact fixes for all three in a Part 2 if people actually want it. The frameworks, the math, the specific plays I run on every MVP launch now that changed everything. Happy to go deep on the value equation, the 30 day cash model, and how to structure an offer so good people feel stupid saying no. Let me know if that's useful or if I should just go back to writing code.

Edit - Part 2 Part 3

A brokerage owner approached me few months back. He spent $18K per month on Zillow and Google and told me his leads sucked and he needed better ones. So I got his response data before building anything.

How long did it take for someone to contact them on average? 3 hrs and 14 minutes.. And yk what… some leads just sat there for like 2 days. Neither anyone called them nor someone sent them a text. Literally nothing happened. It's like he is throwing 18k dollars into a pit.

Here's the thing most agents don't realize. If you contact a lead within 5 minutes they are 10 times more likely to convert compared to calling them after 30 minutes. By 3 hours the person has probably already scheduled a viewing with your competitor.

So neither did I touch his ad spend nor did I change his targeting. I did not get him better leads for his business. I build AI agents for service businesses and basically the kind that pick up leads, qualify them, and book appointments without human interaction.

I simply made an AI agent for him.

It responds within 60sec. It qualifies the buyer and make sure they are serious. Asks the necessary questions yk to see if they are ready to buy and then books the showing right onto the agents calendar.

The First version sounded much like a robot. It took me around 5 weeks to make the handoff to human agents sound normal and tbh that part was harder than the AI itself.

BUT once it clicked…

The conversion rates literally went from 2.3% to 6.1%. This is the difference between getting 4 closings a month and 11…. you figure out the commission. Most agents I speak to think they need leads but that's not true. They do already have leads but they're just not using them. They are letting money sit there because noone replied enough to those leads.

So before you spend another dollar on lead gen…DO ask yourself ….How fast are you actually responding to them?

A brokerage owner approached me few months back. He spent $18K per month on Zillow and Google and told me his leads sucked and he needed better ones. So I got his response data before building anything.

How long did it take for someone to contact them on average? 3 hrs and 14 minutes.. And yk what… some leads just sat there for like 2 days. Neither anyone called them nor someone sent them a text. Literally nothing happened. It's like he is throwing 18k dollars into a pit.

Here's the thing most agents don't realize. If you contact a lead within 5 minutes they are 10 times more likely to convert compared to calling them after 30 minutes. By 3 hours the person has probably already scheduled a viewing with your competitor.

So neither did I touch his ad spend nor did I change his targeting. I did not get him better leads for his business. I build AI agents for service businesses and basically the kind that pick up leads, qualify them, and book appointments without human interaction.

I simply made an AI agent for him.

It responds within 60sec. It qualifies the buyer and make sure they are serious. Asks the necessary questions yk to see if they are ready to buy and then books the showing right onto the agents calendar.

The First version sounded much like a robot. It took me around 5 weeks to make the handoff to human agents sound normal and tbh that part was harder than the AI itself.

BUT once it clicked…

The conversion rates literally went from 2.3% to 6.1%. This is the difference between getting 4 closings a month and 11…. you figure out the commission. Most agents I speak to think they need leads but that's not true. They do already have leads but they're just not using them. They are letting money sit there because noone replied enough to those leads.

So before you spend another dollar on lead gen…DO ask yourself ….How fast are you actually responding to them?

When you try to serve everyone you end up competing on price. This is because the buyer can't tell you apart from the many shops in their DMs. You become like a product that can be easily replaced and such products usually get cheaper.

I've built around 40 automations for my clients and I think most AI agencies will go out of business. Not because there is no work but because saying "we build chatbots for anyone" is a strategy. It's a race to the bottom.The agencies that will survive are those that choose an area and go deep into it. Here's why this approach works... A buyer doesn't pay for a chatbot for the sake of having one, they pay to solve a problem or remove a risk. A generalist might say, "I can probably figure out what your business needs.", on the other hand a specialist says, "I've done this exact thing for 9 dental practices and I know what usually goes wrong."…This kind of statement makes the buyer feel safer. It is this feeling of safety that allows you to charge much more, sometimes 10 times or even 100 times more. The generalist is making an educated guess while the specialist is offering a thing and people are willing to pay A LOT more for things.

So how do you choose a niche that’s worth focusing on? There are 4 things to consider :)

 First…is there pain? Is there a problem that’s currently costing them money or keeping them up at night?

 Second… do they have the money to pay for a solution? Is the return on investment obvious?

 Third are they easy to reach? Is there a place where they gather so you don't have to hunt for them one by one?

 Fourth…Is the industry shrinking and might force you to leave in a couple of years?

If a niche checks all these boxes( i.e. Pain, money, reachable, growing)… then commit to it and don't look back.

I build AI systems in the iGaming space and after spending time working with gaming companies and seeing what they actually use I have made a list of what I think is good and not so good

 Here is my honest list of the best and worst :)

Already using AI and making money:

1.  AI for gambling: Places like the UK some US states and the EU are making it necessary for casinos to use AI to watch players… This isn't technology BUT it's essential. Casinos without AI systems to monitor players and stop problems are in danger of losing their licenses. The ones that already use it aren't just following rules but they're also saving a lot of money.

Fraud and integrity detection: AI helps find cheating like bot detection, VPN misuse or manipulating bets right away. Casinos using this technology have stopped losing a lot of money to cheaters. The ones that aren't using it are losing money without realizing it.

2.     Companies trying AI and seeing results:

 Personalized experience for players: AI helps make bets more appealing …offers deals (AI-driven CRM triggers) and predicts when players might stop playing. The difference between casinos that use AI and those that don't is getting bigger fast.

 AI customer support:  AI helps with customer service 24/7 and makes it easier to sign up and solves payment problems. This saves a lot of money but many medium-sized casinos haven't started using it yet.

3.     AI ideas that are promising but still developing:

 AI for making bets and setting odds:  AI can change odds and make tiny bets automatically but it is not ready for most casinos. Making bets in time is very hard because it needs to be fast.

The main point is that casinos using AI are pulling ahead of those that are not and this is becoming a big problem  for the ones that don't catch up.

I build AI systems in the iGaming space and after spending time working with gaming companies and seeing what they actually use I have made a list of what I think is good and not so good

 Here is my honest list of the best and worst :)

Already using AI and making money:

1.  AI for gambling: Places like the UK some US states and the EU are making it necessary for casinos to use AI to watch players… This isn't technology BUT it's essential. Casinos without AI systems to monitor players and stop problems are in danger of losing their licenses. The ones that already use it aren't just following rules but they're also saving a lot of money.

Fraud and integrity detection: AI helps find cheating like bot detection, VPN misuse or manipulating bets right away. Casinos using this technology have stopped losing a lot of money to cheaters. The ones that aren't using it are losing money without realizing it.

2.     Companies trying AI and seeing results**:**

 Personalized experience for players: AI helps make bets more appealing …offers deals (AI-driven CRM triggers) and predicts when players might stop playing. The difference between casinos that use AI and those that don't is getting bigger fast.

 AI customer support:  AI helps with customer service 24/7 and makes it easier to sign up and solves payment problems. This saves a lot of money but many medium-sized casinos haven't started using it yet.

3.     AI ideas that are promising but still developing:

 AI for making bets and setting odds:  AI can change odds and make tiny bets automatically but it is not ready for most casinos. Making bets in time is very hard because it needs to be fast.

The main point is that casinos using AI are pulling ahead of those that are not and this is becoming a big problem  for the ones that don't catch up.

I build AI systems in the iGaming space and after spending time working with gaming companies and seeing what they actually use I have made a list of what I think is good and not so good

 Here is my honest list of the best and worst :)

Already using AI and making money:

1.  AI for gambling: Places like the UK some US states and the EU are making it necessary for casinos to use AI to watch players… This isn't technology BUT it's essential. Casinos without AI systems to monitor players and stop problems are in danger of losing their licenses. The ones that already use it aren't just following rules but they're also saving a lot of money.

Fraud and integrity detection: AI helps find cheating like bot detection, VPN misuse or manipulating bets right away. Casinos using this technology have stopped losing a lot of money to cheaters. The ones that aren't using it are losing money without realizing it.

2.     Companies trying AI and seeing results:

 Personalized experience for players: AI helps make bets more appealing …offers deals (AI-driven CRM triggers) and predicts when players might stop playing. The difference between casinos that use AI and those that don't is getting bigger fast.

 AI customer support:  AI helps with customer service 24/7 and makes it easier to sign up and solves payment problems. This saves a lot of money but many medium-sized casinos haven't started using it yet.

3.     AI ideas that are promising but still developing:

 AI for making bets and setting odds:  AI can change odds and make tiny bets automatically but it is not ready for most casinos. Making bets in time is very hard because it needs to be fast.

The main point is that casinos using AI are pulling ahead of those that are not and this is becoming a big problem  for the ones that don't catch up.

When you try to serve everyone you end up competing on price. This is because the buyer can't tell you apart from the many shops in their DMs. You become like a product that can be easily replaced and such products usually get cheaper.

I've built around 40 automations for my clients and I think most AI agencies will go out of business. Not because there is no work but because saying "we build chatbots for anyone" is a strategy. It's a race to the bottom.The agencies that will survive are those that choose an area and go deep into it. Here's why this approach works... A buyer doesn't pay for a chatbot for the sake of having one, they pay to solve a problem or remove a risk. A generalist might say, "I can probably figure out what your business needs.", on the other hand a specialist says, "I've done this exact thing for 9 dental practices and I know what usually goes wrong."…This kind of statement makes the buyer feel safer. It is this feeling of safety that allows you to charge much more, sometimes 10 times or even 100 times more. The generalist is making an educated guess while the specialist is offering a thing and people are willing to pay A LOT more for things.

So how do you choose a niche that’s worth focusing on? There are 4 things to consider :)

 First…is there pain? Is there a problem that’s currently costing them money or keeping them up at night?

 Second… do they have the money to pay for a solution? Is the return on investment obvious?

 Third are they easy to reach? Is there a place where they gather so you don't have to hunt for them one by one?

 Fourth…Is the industry shrinking and might force you to leave in a couple of years?

If a niche checks all these boxes( i.e. Pain, money, reachable, growing)… then commit to it and don't look back.

I spent three weeks building an agent for a client earlier this year when a 200 dollar per month workflow would have done the job. This project is a big  part of why I think about the line between automations and agents as much as I do now.

The short version is that an automation follows fixed steps… an agent has a language model deciding what to do next. Most founders use the words automations and agents interchangeably and that is where the money gets wasted.Automations fail when the process behind them is broken. If your team can’t write down the steps on paper then you are automating hosh-posh. You need to fix the workflow.

Agents fail when the task needs judgment. I built an agent for a client that handled customer questions on their website. It got most of them right and the ones it got wrong were bad…like telling a customer their order was delayed when it was not and the founder had to issue a refund over something that never happened. He killed it after 6 weeks.

I build automations and AI agents for companies and based on my experience let me tell you what is worth building now....

Lead followup is worth building. Most teams respond to leads in hours. A workflow built in n8n or make that fires within minutes closes that gap for 200$ per month and pays for itself within the first week. Most of the projects I take on are in the 3000$ to 8000$ range… take under two weeks and cost less than 500 dollars per month to run. Internal reporting is also worth building. Pulling numbers from Slack, your CRM and Stripe into one status update every morning is worth building. No one has to compile it by hand and this saves 5 to 8 hours a week depending on team size.

NOW….What is not worth building yet

Anything where tone matters more than accuracy is not worth building. For example, customer-facing copy, sales emails, deal follow-ups are not worth building. A wrong word costs trust and trust is expensive to rebuild.

If nobody on your team can explain the process, you do not have an automation project… you have a process design problem. If someone on your team spends their morning copying data between tabs and pasting updates into Slack that is not an intelligence problem… that is a 4000$ project sitting on your desk now.

One question I keep asking founders before I scope anything is "who on your team spends more than one hour a day doing something repetitive that follows the same steps?" If they can answer that , there is a project building.