Day 15 – Beginning Systems – Journey Of Launching An AI Startup. Win or Perish Challenge 2025!

Today I flicked between Google Startup School, a local tech conference and a fairly major sales call. And did some refactoring of my mobile app which will link up to an LLM eventually.

It’s been two weeks and a fairly manic one at that. Initially I had planned to watch loads of AI tutorials & play with AI for three months before even doing anything else.

In actual fact I’ve found myself focusing on the business actions:

Having conversations with potential business partners
Running through ideas and looking at current AI Startups
Making my first YouTube videos
Putting together a website with dashboard and stripe integration
Talking to my first few potential customers
Working on the existing AI platform attempting to get it running
Posting my thoughts every day on this website, and linking to it from LinkedIn

But how much ‘AI’ have I actually done? Well, of course I use it all the time throughout the day. Claude cleans up my frontend, and ChatGPT helps me navigate through the other bits. It’s scary how little I use Google now, although I do find that StackOverflow is still super useful and often the last resort I goto; it’s a shame that they have been massively negatively affected by AI. I’m sure they will figure out a way forward.

But in term’s of actual AI R&D, I haven’t been doing enough, and I’m going to make amends for that. The plan was to link up the dashboard once that’s up and running, and I’m close to that, but I need to be motoring forward a lot faster.

End Of Sprint 1

Although I hadn’t really planned anything out for the first sprint, my strategy had pretty much been just to jump in and get started. I knew that there’s really only two options for me:

Make web products that take advantage of the new AI tooling that provide value
Help others navigate through the world of AI

This is nothing ground-breaking and is fairly obvious. But I hadn’t planned on getting started with an AI Agency straight away but my gut feeling is that feels like the right way forward. I can supplement the AI focus with my last two decades of professional web dev experience, and by dealing with customers in the field, I have a better idea of the problems they are facing and how AI can solve things for them.

Of course this is nothing new. I’m sure most web development agencies will make this transition eventually. The difference for me is I had got bored of the idea of running purely a web development agency, and AI was this bright and shiny ‘new thing’ that is genuinely transformative. I was around when the Internet was just taking off, and missed some opportunities due to not having mentors and good advice around me when I was struggling… so I’m in a better position now to assess what to do at this point.

Point is, I’ve created positive momentum at this point, and that’s the main takeaway. But I want to tweak somewhat.

Businesses are systems

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. —W. EDWARDS DEMING,

Kaufman, Josh. The Personal MBA (p. 165). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Essentially, a system is a set of repeatable processes that produce a result. It’s similar to a plan, but this is a plan that is meant to be repeated, over and over, tweaked where necessary.

All successful entities use systems to hone their craft, and if you are getting over worked, it’s a good idea to think about how you can systemise your business from the ground-up.

The amount of jobs I’ve gone into where it’s basically just ‘get on with it’ and for most situations this gets the job done albeit really inefficiently. Employees at companies I’ve worked at never have a daily system and that’s why management and upper management get so fixated on reports and metrics in order to understand a complete mess of a system in the first place!

There’s a really good book called the E-Myth which positions the turn-key franchise model as the most successful businesses out there. Franchise owners can buy into the business and because there’s a clear plan for how everything operates, they normally generate profits. Franchises are drivers in how America accelerated and how globalisation began.

So the challenge is to work out actions the needs to take each cycle. A cycle can be a anything from 24 to 72 hrs. Whatever you want really.

Fortunately, business has already been mapped out pretty well, and one of the components is to do some sort of R&D concerning your business. I think a lot of people miss this, since it’s not immediate payoffs, but when you are a few years down the road, if you aren’t researching and retooling, you eventually get left behind.

Every day I need to be increasing my knowledge of the industry, but in a valuable way. This is likely going to be watching Y Combinator startup school, or YouTubes of AI tooling being used. So everyday I will allocate a set amount of time to ensuring this gets done, I’ll throw it on my blog at least, and if it’s really good I’ll add to my social feeds. What I like to do these days with YouTube is to copy all the transcript and run it through an LLM so I can summarise the best bits.
Every day I need to be practically working with tooling, and where appropriate making content on it. The main focus here is catching up with the latest AI stuff and practically implementing it. I’ve had a list of YouTube videos to watch for a while now, and other things have taken priority.

The Challenge Of AI

The challenge most startups face will be the ability of others to replicate your product; and for the deep funded companies they will be able to do so almost immediately. This is somewhat frustrating. At least when the internet was born, it was fairly open territory. AI there is already the tech establishment and they are going full pace at it. But you have to get beyond that, keep going and look for the opportunites that can work for you; and are harder for big companies to get excited about. The main strength you have as a startup is your ability to be nimble.