I Used to Spend $100,000 a Year Turning Ideas Into Products. AI Changed the Equation.

For years, I spent around $100,000 a year on developers and marketing just to turn ideas into things people could actually use.

I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on a single software feature, waited months for it to be finished, and still ended up with code that did not work the way it was supposed to.

Eventually, that changes how you think.

You stop asking:

And start asking:

That distinction probably killed more of my ideas than I will ever know.

Then AI showed up.

For the first time in my career, I can feel the economics of creation changing underneath me.

Ideas were abundant. Execution was expensive.

I have been building businesses around technology since 2008. Having ideas was rarely the difficult part.

Execution was.

Every idea carried an invisible price tag.

Software meant developers. Growth meant marketers. Design meant designers. Automation meant another project.

Even relatively simple ideas could require weeks of explanations, estimates, meetings, revisions and testing before I knew whether they were actually worth pursuing.

One experience I still think about is a trade-in drawer we were developing.

From the customer's perspective, the idea was straightforward. Open an interface, choose a device, answer a few questions and move through the trade-in process.

Behind the scenes, it became months of development.

Money kept going out. Something would get fixed and another problem would appear. Small changes became new development cycles. Every misunderstanding meant another round of messages, revisions, testing and waiting.

I have put tens of thousands of dollars into individual features like that and still ended up with something that needed more work.

Eventually, the money was not what frustrated me most.

It was the loss of control.

I wanted a working result. The process seemed capable of continuing indefinitely.

I have worked with talented developers, and I still want talented developers around me. This is not an argument that developers intentionally drag projects out.

It is an observation about the model I experienced.

I was paying for time when what I really wanted was progress.

After enough experiences like that, the friction begins shaping your creativity. You stop asking what could be built and start asking whether the idea is worth the pain of building it.

That is a terrible filter for innovation.

Then AI changed the feedback loop

When generative AI first became mainstream, much of the conversation focused on writing emails, generating images, creating articles and answering questions.

Useful? Absolutely.

But that was not what changed everything for me.

What changed everything was the feedback loop.

I can have an idea and immediately begin interrogating it.

Does the market exist? What am I missing? Who already does it? What are the economics? How should the system work? Why is the code failing? What happens if we approach it differently? Can we prototype it? Can we test it?

The old process often looked like this:

Explain. Wait. Review. Clarify. Wait again. Test. Find another problem. Begin another development cycle.

Today, large portions of that process can happen while I am still sitting at my desk thinking through the original idea.

That changes much more than cost.

AI gave me control back.

For years, the friction of execution made me more cautious with ideas.

AI is making me ambitious again.

My old $100,000-a-year model is gone

I am not saying I will never spend $100,000 a year on talented people again.

I may spend far more.

What has changed is what I am willing to pay that money for.

I no longer need to hire someone every time I need access to a capability. I do not need a full development process just to determine whether an idea is technically possible. I do not need a different specialist involved in every early stage of research, analysis, writing, strategy and prototyping.

I can start.

That sounds simple, but economically it is enormous.

For most of my career, access to capability was part of the moat. If you could afford the developers, marketers, designers and specialists, you could attempt things other people simply could not.

AI is making a growing amount of that capability available before you assemble the team.

That does not make talented people less important.

It changes why I hire them.

Developers are not obsolete. Development has to evolve.

I do not believe developers are disappearing.

I do believe a developer cannot work exactly the way they did five years ago and assume nothing about their value proposition will change.

A developer whose main value is translating straightforward requirements into code now has tools capable of doing a surprising amount of that work very quickly.

The developer I want today is different.

I want the person who uses AI too.

Someone who understands architecture, security, performance, scale and edge cases. Someone who can look at something we built quickly and recognize the problem I cannot see. Someone who challenges the premise instead of simply completing the ticket.

Someone who can take a rough prototype and make it trustworthy.

A great developer armed with AI may become dramatically more valuable than before.

What is disappearing is a lot of the premium we once paid simply because development itself was inaccessible.

Marketing is moving in the same direction.

Average copy is becoming abundant. Basic research is abundant. Routine graphics and generic campaigns are abundant.

The marketer who brings positioning, taste, empathy, storytelling and strategy becomes more valuable.

AI is not necessarily reducing the value of people.

It is raising the minimum standard for human work.

When execution gets cheaper, the advantage moves

This is the part I find most interesting.

For most of modern business history, being able to imagine something and being able to build it were very different things.

Technical skill was a gatekeeper.

Capital was a gatekeeper.

Access to specialists was a gatekeeper.

AI is lowering those gates.

It is not eliminating expertise. It is not eliminating engineering. It is not making everyone equally capable.

But it is giving far more people access to execution.

And when the scarce resource changes, the advantage changes with it.

For most of my career:

Ideas were abundant. Execution was scarce.

If execution becomes increasingly abundant, something else becomes scarce.

Judgment.

Taste.

Trust.

Experience.

Knowing which problem is worth solving.

Knowing what not to build.

The ability to see a connection somebody else misses.

That is what I mean when I talk about creativity in the AI era.

Not just artists or designers.

I mean people who can look at what exists and imagine something better.

AI gives those people leverage they have never had before.

AI is also going to create a mountain of garbage

Lowering the cost of creation does not automatically make what gets created good.

AI can produce mediocre websites faster. Generic content by the ton. Bad software. Meaningless marketing. Hundreds of business ideas nobody actually wants.

The world is going to become noisier.

And I think that makes judgment more important, not less.

When production becomes abundant, simply producing something stops being impressive.

AI can give you a hundred answers.

It cannot make all hundred of them right.

It can help you build almost anything.

That does not mean almost anything is worth building.

The person using the tool still matters.

Experience did not become less valuable. It compounded.

One of the most surprising things about AI is how much more useful it has made old experience feel.

I have spent years learning ecommerce, hardware, trade-ins, inventory, repair, fraud, customer service, logistics, SEO, marketing, software, vendors, hiring and operations.

A lot of those lessons were expensive.

AI did not erase them.

It made them more valuable.

The more I understand a problem, the better questions I know to ask.

The more bad systems I have seen, the faster I recognize weak architecture.

The more money I have wasted, the quicker I recognize an economic model that does not make sense.

The more businesses I operate, the easier it becomes to recognize when two problems that appear unrelated are actually connected.

AI provides leverage.

Experience gives me something useful to apply that leverage to.

Eventually, everyone is going to have access to very capable AI.

The differentiator will not simply be having it.

It will be what you know to do with it.

"Why don't we just build it?" used to be an expensive sentence

Over the past week, I have had a strange feeling that several things I thought were competing for my attention are beginning to converge.

I have a lot going on across ecommerce, media, software, marketplaces, repair, security and automation.

At times, I have genuinely wondered whether I simply have too many priorities.

Recently, some of those ideas started connecting.

One example happened while I was working on Techable News with AI.

We were using a tool that lets AI interact directly with WordPress, and eventually we hit a limitation.

My reaction was immediate:

Why can't we just build this ourselves?

A few years ago, that would have been an expensive sentence.

It would have meant defining the project, finding developers, collecting estimates, deciding whether the idea justified the cost, waiting for a first version and then starting the revision cycle.

This time, we started looking at how the system worked.

What initially sounded like another substantial software project suddenly looked surprisingly achievable.

Then came another question.

If AI can safely understand and manage a WordPress site, why couldn't it help secure one?

Then another.

Why would it stop at WordPress?

That line of thinking connected with Secure365, something I had already been developing from a completely different direction.

A frustrating limitation in one tool had turned into a new way of thinking about an entire company.

A few years ago, the first idea might have died waiting for execution before the next idea ever had the chance to collide with it.

That is one of the biggest differences I feel now.

Sometimes the next question is the opportunity.

And this time, instead of just writing the idea down, we started building it.

Adults tell kids they can do anything. Then adulthood gives them the price list.

When we are young, adults tell us we can be anything we want to be.

Then adulthood introduces the footnotes.

Do you have the money?

Can you code?

Can you afford employees?

Do you know the right people?

Can you market it?

Can you afford to spend $50,000 simply finding out whether the idea works?

AI does not eliminate reality.

Bad ideas are still bad ideas. Judgment still matters. Hard work still matters. People still matter.

But AI is making the price list shorter.

Someone who could never afford a development team can begin building software.

A small company can access capabilities that once required a much larger organization.

A person can learn while creating instead of waiting until they feel qualified to begin.

An entrepreneur can test an idea before betting their savings on it.

Maybe the childhood promise was never really that everyone would succeed at anything they attempted.

Maybe the important part was believing they were allowed to try.

AI is giving far more people that opportunity.

I understand why people are scared

There are legitimate reasons to worry about AI.

Jobs will change. Some businesses will disappear. People will abuse these tools. Fraud will improve. Bad information will become easier to manufacture.

I do not dismiss any of that.

But fear has never been my first instinct when technology changes.

My first question tends to be:

What does this make possible now?

When we read about major technological shifts afterward, everything seems obvious.

Living through one is different.

You do not know which ideas will matter, which companies will survive, or which predictions will look ridiculous five years later.

History feels inevitable in hindsight. Living through it feels uncertain.

I have read about technological revolutions my entire life.

This is the first time I have felt like I am standing inside one.

And this time, I get to participate in building whatever comes next.

I don't know whether it is destiny

The timing is difficult for me to ignore.

I spent years learning businesses the expensive way.

I spent years frustrated by the cost of translating ideas into reality.

I built companies around technology and accumulated ideas that did not always have an obvious place to go.

Then, just as those experiences started connecting, a technology arrived that dramatically reduced the distance between what I could imagine and what I could realistically attempt.

Maybe that is coincidence.

Maybe it is timing.

Maybe that is simply what convergence feels like when you are standing inside it.

Whatever it is, I feel incredibly fortunate to be building right now.

For most of my career, the first question after an idea was:

Can I afford to build this?

Increasingly, that is no longer the most interesting question.

The question is becoming:

Should this exist?