You just worked for $1.50/hour and called it building.

There's a specific moment when builders realize they've been lying to themselves.

It's not when they run out of ideas. It's not when the tool doesn't work.

It's when they finally admit they've been optimizing for the wrong variable.

You spent 40 hours building an AI wrapper that automates something niche. It works. It's elegant. You post it. You get 200 upvotes on Reddit. Maybe 50 people sign up.

Then you check Stripe.

3 paying customers. $60 MRR.

And you realize: you just worked for $1.50/hour.

But if you'd spent those same 40 hours setting up cold email infrastructure, writing 5 solid offer angles, and sending 2,000 emails…

You'd probably have 3–5 discovery calls booked. At least one would move forward. One $3k client pays you $75/hour for those same 40 hours.

The math is brutal.

The reason people avoid it isn't because they don't understand. It's because understanding means admitting the thing they're good at (building) is orthogonal to the thing that generates cash (selling).

Cold email doesn't feel prestigious. It doesn't go viral. It doesn't get you on a podcast.

But it converts attention into money faster than anything else available to solo technical people right now.

Most people won't answer this honestly: how many hours did you spend building something that made less than $500?

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