How to Guarantee You Fail in the AI Space
If you want to guarantee you fail in AI and automation: Keep consuming content. Keep watching YouTube videos. Keep bookmarking new tools. Just don't build. Here are the 4 behaviors that are guaranteeing your failure in the AI & automation space: 1. Stay on the sidelines. Tell yourself you're "getting ready." Meanwhile, someone else ships messy. Josh Pigford saw a tweet about an AI idea, publicly said "I'm building this," shipped a rough MVP in a weekend, turned it into paying users, and exited for around $15k. It wasn't polished. It just existed. Observers don't get leverage. Builders do. If you never attach your name to something real, you never get feedback, users, or momentum. --- 2. Chase every new, shiny tool. The moment a new model drops, you abandon what you were learning. A 2025 breakdown on AI startups warned that founders chasing every shiny tool end up scattered, burned out, and shallow. The ones actually growing picked a tiny stack and mastered it deeply against specific goals. Mastery compounds. Hype resets. If you're chasing the newest tool like everyone else, you're constantly starting from zero. --- 3. Avoid choosing a niche. Stay vague. Be "into AI." Be "doing automation." Meanwhile, AI agencies charging $2-3k per client per month aren't generalists. They're solving specific problems for specific clients. They're "AI marketing for med spas." They're "AI video systems for B2B SaaS." Once they picked a lane, offers got clearer, referrals got warmer, and revenue got predictable. Generalists feel safe. Specialists get paid. --- 4. Confuse motion with progress. Build private projects. Refine invisible systems. Take more courses. A founder recently grew from $10k to $18.5k MRR in 90 days—not by learning more tools, but by DMing real prospects, shipping AI products clients could touch, and letting those shipped builds become proof. Another builder prototyped a SaaS in a week using AI and used that demo to close clients. They didn't "prepare." They shipped.