I Spent $1,257 on AI Tools to Build a Business. I Made $0.
The solution isn't a better tool… it's a completely different approach.
My credit card statement read like a who’s who of AI crap…
$29 for an AI writer,
$24 for another AI writer,
$22 for again, another AI writer,
$47 for a funnel-builder,
$19 for a scheduler.
My Stripe account?
A ghost town.
I had mistaken the act of buying tools for the work of building a business , and the only thing my “stack” was producing was a longer list of logins.
I had Google sheets maxed out to the hilt with emails and passwords…
I felt like I was trying to assemble a machine with 100 parts and no manual (and I’m good at Lego)… but it was just a pile of expensive components and the feeling that I was fucked.
Sound familiar, I see a few of you nodding your head…
Great intention, very little movement.
It’s that annoying frustration of staring at half-finished work while the AI market moves at warp speed, and your wallet takes another hit for yet again another life saving tool.
That’s not just you, it wasn’t just me…
It’s a symptom.
Of an industry that is built on money for confusion.
Let me say this straight off the bat…
This isn’t a talent issue, you’re not dumb.
It’s not even a motivation issue.
It’s certainly not a hustle issue.
You’re not lazy or unskilled.
You’re trapped (purposedly).
You’re inside what I call the ‘Creator Chaos Loop’… ye ye, it’s a fancy way of saying…
A miserable, spinning life sapping ride powered by the very industry that promises to set you free…
Just buy my tool and it will all be better, says everyone, always.
It goes like this:
You feel the pain of not making progress.
You seek a solution, a new AI tool, another course, a “secret” prompt list.
You watch the tutorials, you buy the tool, you get a temporary hit of dopamine.
You try to implement it, but it doesn’t plug into anything. It’s just another loose part.
You get overwhelmed by the added complexity.
You do nothing. You feel guilty.
The pain of not making progress returns, sharper this time.
This cycle is brutal.
After a while it kills your ambition.
It’s a real slow-burn of a fire that eats away at your confidence until all that’s left is the cold, gnawing fear that you’ll waste years and still end up with nothing.
That’s the real cost of this loop… the terror of wasted years.
Sorry, I had to get a bit poetic there.
And the reason being is this…
You’ve been told a convenient, copywritten… profitable lie.
This lie tells you the problem is a lack of knowledge or the wrong tools.
So, you keep collecting digital hammers, convinced that more effort, more motion, will eventually lead to momentum, AND profit.
But the hammer won’t.
Because the problem was never the hammer.
The problem is you’re swinging in the dark, not even hitting what you need to…
Most, and I’m sad to say this… don’t even know what their real problem is.
The Old Man and the $10,000 Invoice
There’s an old parable that has stuck with me for years. It’s about a giant cruise ship whose main engine broke down.
The ship’s owners were desperate.
They brought in expert after expert, but none of them could figure out how to fix the colossal machine. (If you’ve ever been on a cruise ship you know how big these things are… so cool).
The ship was dead in the water, losing millions by the day.
Eventually, after much dilly-dallying, they hired an old man who had been fixing ships his entire life.
He arrived with a large, worn-out bag of tools and immediately got to work.
The owners watched him, skeptical, as he spent about 20 minutes methodically inspecting the massive engine, walking around it, listening, feeling.
Then, he stopped.
He reached into his bag and pulled out a single, small hammer.
He gently, almost floatingly moved his way to a specific spot on the intricate machinery, a spot no one else had paid any attention to, and gave it a single, firm tap.
Instantly, the engine roared back to life.
The old man quietly packed his hammer away and left.
A few days later, the owners received his invoice for $10,000.
They were outraged.
“He hardly did any work!” they exclaimed. “This is a ripoff! He was only here for 20 minutes!”
They wrote back to the old man, demanding an itemized bill.
He sent one back. It read:
Tapping with a hammer: $2.00
Knowing where to tap: $9,998.00
Your Business Isn’t Broken, You’re Just Tapping in the Wrong Place
This story is the key to everything.
For years, I was the guy trying to fix the engine by hitting every part of it, getting exhausted, and only making things worse.
I was paying for effort, not results.
I was buying more hammers. I think over those 5 years of zero results I spent upwards of $29,000 on hammers…
And nothing.
The solo creator/entrepreneur economy is an economy of hammers.
It sells you AI tools, prompt packs, 50-step funnels, and weekend workshops.
It sells you the tapping.
The industry loves a good dose of complexity… why?
Because this simple act manufactures dependency.
It convinces you that the secret is in the tool, the hack, the sheer force of your hustle.
The real secret?
The one nobody wants to sell you because it’s not a shiny object?
The problem isn’t your tools.
It’s that you’re building without a system.
AI hasn’t solved this…
For most, it’s made it worse.
AI is the most powerful hammer ever created, but without a blueprint, it’s just a faster way to build a mess.
It amplifies your effort, but if your effort is pointed at the wrong things, you’re just speeding your way to a messy desktop and towards burnout.
The shift your business needs
The one that took me from drowning in digital crap to building a business that runs with clarity, is when I stopped looking for a better hammer and start building the blueprint.
You stop asking, “What tool should I use?” and start asking…
“What’s the system?”
This is the upgrade… this is Neo in the Matrix.
What you need isn’t another tool.
You need a ruthlessly simple execution system.
An execution system isn’t a piece of software.
It’s not a 90-minute webinar.
It’s an architecture for your actions.
It’s a structure of constraints, priorities, and leverage points that translates your ideas into created, posted and profitable work.
It’s what gives you what the old man in the story had… the ‘knowing where to tap’ knowledge.
Let me make this concrete.
A tactic-chaser (the person with 47 tabs open) asks:
“How can I use AI to write 10 tweets?”
They get 10 tweets, post them into the billion other competing noise creators, and feel the familiar stomach turn of “now what?”
A system-builder asks:
“What is the single, core outcome I need to achieve this week? (e.g., Validate my new offer).”
Then they ask…
“What is the simplest path to that outcome? (e.g., A 3-day email challenge).”
Then, and only then, they ask…
“How can AI help me execute that specific path, faster? (e.g., ‘Act as my thinking partner to refine the core promise of my 3-day challenge, then outline the 3 emails based on the Pain-Agitate-Solve framework’).”
Do you see the difference?
Like I mean, do you really see the difference?
Read it again if you have to…
In the first scenario, the AI is your boss.
In the second, it’s your leverage.
The tactic-chaser (or opportunity seeker) is forever stuck in the Chaos Loop, looking for the next hit.
The system-builder is installing an engine.
They are moving from being a confused tool-user to a strategic builder.
This is what I call System-First Thinking.
It’s the foundational principle of Simple Leverage.
It’s the belief that business isn’t content-first or idea-first… it’s system-first.
Until you have a simplified structure to plug into, everything else is just false motion.
Installing Your Own Engine of Clarity
So how do you start building a system instead of just collecting tools?
You start with strategic subtraction,
Not addition.
You embrace Strategic Minimalism.
You build what I call a Clarity Stack… the absolute minimum number of tools, beliefs, and repeatable steps you need to get from idea to income.
My own content business, which consistently brings in over $30k a month, runs on an absurdly simple stack…
Google Docs for writing, my custom GPTs for strategic leverage, and Systeme.io to deliver the goods.
That’s it.
No 50-step funnels.
No army of automations.
Just a lean system that I trust and execute on, daily.
Now now now… you might say to yourself, but I want to automate it all…
Let me tell you this. Blunt.
AI Automations in full swing at this point in their life cycle are dumb, context poor attempts at being you…
Use them ONLY for posting, not automatic creation… well at least not full creation.
To get real quality, human (your) input is still needed, but only at a level where you add to growing your business, not acting like a hamster on a wheel.
Thing is…
Clarity and leverage isn’t about having the “best” tools.
It’s about having a system that profits, again and again and again.
This wasn’t some lightning-bolt insight.
It was forged in fire… in fuck ups.
I had to burn my own chaotic business to the ground to find this clarity.
I deleted the complex funnels, unsubscribed from the gurus, and went quiet.
I stopped trying to be clever and started being strategic.
I stopped looking for another guru to follow and started reverse-engineering what actually works…
Not just the tactics, but the underlying thinking.
What I learned from mentors like Jay Abraham wasn’t a secret funnel… it was about value.
The core idea is that your purpose cannot be to get rich, it must be to deliver such overwhelming value and clarity that you become the only logical choice for your client.
The market is full of people selling hammers.
Value is being the one who shows them where to tap.
Stop Buying Hammers
You don’t need another guru with a bigger hammer.
You need to become the one who knows where to aim first.
The engine of your business isn’t broken, you’ve just been swinging at the wrong pipe.
This was Part 1 of a 30-part journey. To get the next chapter on how to find the right pipe to swing at, subscribe to my Substack/email list here.