36 - Building my 2nd 8-figure business, powered by AI, and all bootstrapped. Almost at $1M ARR after 4 months. 📈 35 - RapidDev hit 1,025% growth over three years. 34 - took 40 team members to Egypt for four days because remote work is lonely 33 - crossed 200 hires and learned M&A on the fly 32 - unlearned the VC startup game and figured out how to run a real business 31 - founded RapidDev, because it was crazy that companies weren't building with no-code 👨‍💻 30 - raised $8M, company got acquired, daughter was born. 29 - still convinced the next thing had to be bigger than the last thing 28 - deep in the grind, too busy to notice it was the grind 27 - became a dad, started a company, and went through business school in the same year. No clue what I was doing, where I was going, or how any of it fit together. 26 - got into Harvard Business School (yes, even Harvard makes mistakes) 🤓 25 - became a husband. Family life in the Navy isn't easy, so entrepreneurship became the next adventure. 24 - learned that I thrive under stress and in chaos, which is a strange thing to be grateful for 23 - the military taught me what leadership actually costs 22 - in uniform, nowhere near a cubicle 21 - internship at a Fortune 100. Saw my future in a cubicle, hated it, joined the Navy instead 🎖️ 20 - switched majors to engineering thinking I'd learn how to build something real 19 - worked in a research lab and realized the quiet, methodical path wasn't for me. Also met my future wife there, mixing chemicals. 🌶️ 18 - federal grants came through. Picked the college farthest from home that still had in-state tuition. 17 - a chip on my shoulder from growing up somewhere with no economic prosperity 16 to 1 - upstate New York, 30 minutes from Canada. More cows than people. 🐮 0 - born

We got a little surprise from Lovable. 🤯 We are in the top 10% of builders on Lovable! Normally I don't get too excited about partner badges because, let's be honest, a lot of them basically mean you filled out a form and put another logo on your website. But this one was actually pretty cool. RapidDev is now one of the first Lovable Select Partners in the world, and we got both Build Certified and Sell Certified. The crazy part is that we couldn't really BS our way into it lol. Lovable looked at actual products we've shipped for clients and decided whether the work was good enough. Pretty proud of the team for this one! We've spent a lot of time figuring out how to take Lovable projects beyond the cool prototype stage and turn them into actual products people can use and pay for. Nice to have the people who built Lovable look at our work and say "yep, these guys know what they're doing." If you've got an idea you've been wanting to turn into a real product, send it our way. We can help you get it live without burning the next 6 months building it.

I booked a massage therapist for my wife in 60 seconds by texting my AI agent. And yes, if you aren't texting your agent yet, then you are behind... Here’s what happened in the background: - Gave it literally the worst prompt ever - Figured out what I meant, found the right location, and checked availability - Booked the appointment and paid with my credit card (yes, I trust my agent with it at this point) - Sent the confirmation straight to my wife’s email Total effort on my part? Almost 0️⃣ Stress? 0️⃣ Husband points? 🔟 😏

It's crazy how people have mixed opinions about AI. Some think it’s overhyped. Others think it’s underhyped. I totally get why: People are experiencing AI in completely different ways. If your experience with AI is asking ChatGPT to rewrite an email, summarize a meeting, or do some research, it’s pretty easy to think the whole thing is overhyped. I used to think the same way. But last year, my opinion completely flipped. Today, I’m 100% sure AI is actually underhyped. Once AI started getting really good at coding, I saw what agentic AI was capable of, and my entire perspective changed. Since then, I: - Gotten deeply involved with OpenClaw. - Hosted ClawCon in Boston. - Built high-impact agents for my own work and for other businesses. I’m lucky that my business keeps me at the cutting edge of this stuff. I get to see capabilities before they become easy enough for most people to use, and those experiences have made me much more bullish. Based on what I’ve seen this year, most people have no clue how powerful this is going to become.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Who wants to be my co-founder and make $1,000,000,000?? I met a guy who had this idea back in the early 2010s. He searched through patent databases for interesting consumer products that had been invented but never commercialized. Then he built landing pages for them, spent a little money on ads, and tested whether anyone tried to buy. One of the products kept converting. So he contacted the patent holder, licensed it, manufactured the product, and eventually went on Shark Tank!! The story unfortunately ends with Chinese knockoffs killing the business... 😅 But imagine running the original playbook today with AI: → Agents search through thousands of uncommercialized patents. → AI figures out what the actual product could be, estimates the market, and builds landing pages for the strongest ideas. → AI then runs a few ads to see what people actually want, → Then you build a real business around the winners. You could test thousands of products before spending any serious money on inventory or manufacturing. I know how to build the agents to run this. We build systems like this every day at RapidDev for ourselves and our clients. The hard part is getting the whole thing to work reliably. The research has to be useful, the product has to make sense, and the ads have to tell you whether anyone actually wants it. It’s easy to generate thousands of pages of AI slop. I’d want a system that helps us decide which products are worth putting real money behind.

I find life so far is a game of first learning the “truth” and then unlearning it so you can relearn the real TRUTH

I messed up. In July, I raised the public goal for my 2nd business to $3M ARR by the end of the year. September closed at $72,935 MRR, and I’m realizing I got ahead of myself. Quick reminder for anyone following along: Earlier this year, RapidDev built an internal system to create high-quality conversations with potential customers. It worked for us, so we started selling the service to other companies. Here’s the revenue progression: March: $0 April: $1,449.52 May: $3,858.18 June: $23,770.87 July: $56,951 August: $59,750 September: $72,935.02 You can probably see why I got excited. We went from nothing to almost $1M ARR in a few months. Our original goal was $1M ARR by December, and suddenly that felt too easy. So I tripled it. Then August grew just 4.9%. I delegated too quickly, got distracted, and didn’t catch technical problems fast enough. We fixed a bunch of that in September, and revenue grew 22.1%. That’s a good month. But spending more time with the business has made me realize that some of our assumptions about how quickly we could scale were wrong. Now I don’t think our current approach can get us there as quickly as I thought. I still believe we can build this into a $10M business - I just don’t have the path figured out yet. I’m getting the team together again in November and December to revisit some of those fundamental assumptions. We need to work through what’s limiting growth and what we need to do differently. I’m confident we can figure it out with the right people in the room and enough focused work. Back at it.

Instinct, Muse, and all these new AI agents are getting a lot of attention. Most of them will be dead or acquired in 2 years. Here’s why: They’re building products on top of models from OpenAI and Anthropic. They make the models easier to use, connect them to your tools, and package them into something that can do your work. That’s useful. But OpenAI and Anthropic can build those products too. And they have every reason to do it. We’ve already seen this happen with coding. The models got good enough to write code, and suddenly we had Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, Devin, GitHub Copilot, and a bunch of others. Then OpenAI and Anthropic came out with Codex and Claude Code. Now those other tools have to answer a pretty tough question: why should someone use us instead of going straight to the frontier companies? Some will have a good answer, most won't. The same thing is happening with general-purpose agents. OpenAI and Anthropic are coming into that market with ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork. And the incentive is even bigger this time. Only a fraction of the world writes code. Every business has information to look up, systems to update, follow-ups to send, and work that agents could eventually do. Maybe some of these agent startups will build something truly defensible. But if the only advantage is a nicer interface on top of someone else’s intelligence, I wouldn't want to be the founder of that company.

Imagine GDP growing at 10%. Sounds crazy when you look at the last few decades. But what happens when AI agents become a general-purpose productivity engine? Here’s a simple way to run the math: -> 40% of economic activity gets exposed to AI agents -> Agents make that activity 25% more productive -> 50% of exposed companies actually adopt them --> 40% × 25% × 50% = 5% That’s a 5% increase in economy-wide productive capacity. Spread across 5 years, that alone adds roughly one percentage point to annual growth. And that’s only the direct, first-order impact. The second-order effects could be much bigger: - Software becomes dramatically cheaper to build, which makes starting and testing new businesses cheaper too. - Tiny teams supervise entire groups of agents and produce what previously required hundreds of employees. - Scientific research happens faster, and every resulting discovery creates another layer of productivity. Goldman Sachs predicts AI adds ~0.4% to annual U.S. GDP growth. McKinsey estimates 0.5% to 0.9%. Those are safe, conventional forecasts built on old tech adoption curves. I think the upside will be much bigger when companies rebuild themselves around agents. Are you building for a standard 2% growth economy, or preparing for something we’ve never seen before?

I'm the biggest AI enthusiast in the world and I still think replacing your marketing team with AI is one of the stupidest things a founder can do. I lost count of how many times I've heard “I just use AI to do all my marketing now.” No offense, but to me this sounds so stupid. When the cost of producing something trends towards zero, the supply becomes infinite. And when everyone uses the same models to make the same posts, designs, videos, and motion graphics, the value of that work gets pretty close to zero too. AI is great for automating repetitive workflows. But marketing is art. It still has a soul, requires taste, original ideas, a deep understanding of the customer, and the judgment to know what’s actually worth saying. It comes from real experiences, strong opinions, and a human being who genuinely believes something. AI is extremely useful inside that process. Used correctly, it makes talented marketers more productive and much more impactful. But don’t expect it to decide what you believe, what makes you different, or why anyone should care. I still want talented humans making those decisions at my companies, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.