This week's story

I was using AI to build the wrong business faster.

Hi Reader,

A few months ago, I was more productive than I'd ever been in my life.

AI had changed everything about how I worked. Drafts that used to take me half a day were done in an hour. Research I would have put off for a week was finished before lunch. I was building faster, outputting more, keeping up with things I'd always let slide.

And I was building toward something I didn't actually want.

That's the part of the AI conversation nobody talks about.

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I'd been watching what was working in the market. Communities were everywhere. Membership models. Coaching programs with active Skool groups, weekly calls, engagement loops, leaderboards. The gurus of the moment were all doing some version of it.

And the AI was helping me execute on it. Content for the community. Sequences to nurture leads toward joining. Frameworks for running calls. I was moving fast.

Then one afternoon I stopped — not because something went wrong, but because something felt off — and I made myself answer a question I'd been avoiding.

Not "what does the market want?" Not "what model is performing right now?" Not even "what am I good at?"

What do I need this thing to make possible. For me. Specifically.

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I wrote it down. It wasn't complicated.

Years ago, back when I was first finding my way online, I made a banner in Canva. I don't even remember what it was for anymore — just the words on it: Build the life you desire. I'd forgotten that banner existed until I was sitting with this question. Somewhere along the way I'd started building a business that was supposed to support my dreams, and instead I was letting the business dictate the life.

My dad is 90 years old. I want to be available to help take care of him. Not "available in theory" — actually available. That means my schedule cannot be dictated by other people's calendars.

I want to travel. Not constantly, not extravagantly — but freely. That means I can't have a business that falls apart when I'm not in my home office.

I do not want to live on Zoom. I've done it. I'm done with it. Coaching calls, community calls, check-in calls — I'd been slowly building a business that would put me right back on a calendar full of them.

And I do not want to run an active community. The kind that needs daily attention, engagement, moderation, momentum. That's a full-time job inside a full-time job, and I'd done it before and knew what it cost me.

When I looked at what I was building, I saw a business that would have made every single one of those things harder.

AI was helping me build it more efficiently than I ever could have before. And none of that efficiency mattered.

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Once I had my real answer, I started over. Not from scratch — I didn't throw away everything I'd built. But I looked at every model and every tool through a different lens.

Does this support the life I described, or does it complicate it?

Here's what I looked at and what I found:

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The business I'm building now looks nothing like the one I was building six months ago.

It's a newsletter — this one — because writing is how I think and a newsletter can go out from anywhere. It's DFY work for a small number of clients, done on my terms and my timeline. It's a lean tech stack I can manage in a few hours a week. No community to feed. No call calendar to manage.

AI is still central to all of it. But now it's doing what I actually needed it to do — helping me build something that holds up when my dad needs me, when I want to take a trip, when I want a quiet Tuesday.

I'm not describing a perfect business. I'm describing a business I actually want to run.

That's a different thing.

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Here's what I want to leave you with.

There are more AI tools available to you right now than you will ever have time to learn. Every week there are more. The internet will tell you which ones are changing the game, which ones successful people are using, which ones you're falling behind by not using yet.

None of that matters if you don't know what you're trying to build toward.

AI is extraordinarily good at helping you execute. It is not going to tell you what to execute on. That part is yours.

So before the next tool, before the next system, before you sign up for another thing — sit down and answer this honestly:

Thanks for being here for issue one. There's more coming.

Terry

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Reply to this email and tell me: what does YOUR business need to make possible for your life? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious — and because your answer might be the next story I tell.

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P.S. If you want a structured way to work through this, I built a $27 workbook for exactly this moment. Three parts: a Life Requirements Framework, a Business Model Scorecard, and an AI Prompt Kit to work through it all with Claude.

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