$30M Raised. 15 Years In. And I Still Felt Behind — Here's What I Did.
What a 2x founder discovered when AI made experience feel irrelevant.
I’ve raised over $30+ million.
Built companies used by more than 20 million people.
Shipped products at scale. Hired engineers. Managed teams. Generated real revenue.
And last year, when AI coding tools started exploding, I felt behind.
I wasn’t new to AI. I was building Simplified.com when AI writing, design, and video tools started going mainstream. We rode that wave early. Tens of millions of people used those products.
So it wasn’t that I didn’t understand what was happening.
But this wave was different.
The first AI wave lowered the barrier to content.
This one lowered the barrier to software.
Suddenly, people who had never written code were building landing pages, bots, internal tools, mobile apps. Shipping things in hours.
Replit. Claude. Lovable. Codex. Something new every week.
And I hadn’t written real code in 15 years.
I could talk product strategy all day. I could raise capital. I could design a roadmap.
But watching non-engineers ship faster than I was forced me to confront something uncomfortable.
Execution was no longer scarce.
Judgment was.
Watching Wasn’t the Problem. Not Building Was.
I could have quietly learned.
Bought a course. Watched tutorials at night. Played with the tools privately until I felt competent.
That would have been safe.
But I’ve learned something about myself.
If I don’t create pressure, I drift.
And I didn’t want to drift through this moment.
So I did something slightly irrational.
I said I would build something every Sunday. Live.
No slides.
No curriculum.
No “10-step framework.”
Just opening Zoom and building something in real time.
If we were building a landing page, I had to understand the stack.
If we were deploying a bot, I had to think through the product.
If we were charging money, I had to think through the market.
Public accountability forced private reps.
And reps sharpen judgment.
It Wasn’t Clean
At the same time, I was starting another company — Otto AI, a finance platform for creators.
Moving from venture-backed to bootstrap.
Rebuilding from scratch.
I was overworked. Overcommitted. Behind on almost everything.
I’ll give you a specific Sunday so you know what I mean.
The session was about deploying an AI bot — OpenClaw, the first fully autonomous bot that runs in the cloud, remembers everything, takes actions on your behalf. I’d been working on a platform called ClawShip to make deployment simple for non-technical people. The problem I was solving was real: the manual setup takes weeks, involves cloud infrastructure, API keys, security configs. People were abandoning it at step four.
Five minutes before going live, I was still coding. Still fixing things. I thought: shit, this is not gonna work.
I went live anyway.
iPhone mirroring failed. My own Telegram token was bad — I got stuck on the same step as the audience. Then 23 people deployed bots simultaneously, the machine limit hit, and my credit balance went to zero. I was topping up credits live while 20+ people sat in the Zoom waiting.
I promised session recordings that didn’t go up for months.
Some Sundays failed like this.
Tools broke.
Prompts didn’t work.
APIs refused to connect.
People watched it happen live.
There were weeks I asked myself if I should stop.
It would have been easier.
But I kept showing up.
Not because I had it figured out.
Because I didn’t.
And that started to matter.
The First Signal
At first, about 20 people showed up.
Five or seven came back every week.
Same names. Same questions.
That consistency mattered more than growth. They weren’t just watching — they were building.
After a few weeks, people started asking if there was a group. So I created a WhatsApp.
No funnel strategy. No marketing playbook.
Just Instagram → Zoom → WhatsApp.
The group grew to over 450 builders. Substack crossed 7,000 subscribers. Sessions now get 200+ RSVPs, around 60 live.
Not viral. But real.
Consistency compounds.
From Millions to $175 — And Why That Matters
I’ve built companies that generated millions in revenue.
This time, I was building alone. With AI.
ClawShip went from zero to 30 customers in about 10 days. $175 in revenue.
Not impressive on paper.
But here’s what actually happened on that Sunday session after I fixed the credit issue and got the machines running:
27 out of 33 bots ended up live. One of the people in that session — David — told me he’d spent two full days trying to deploy the same bot on his own. Tried AWS. Tried other cloud setups. Couldn’t get past the configuration. Gave up. Then found me on Instagram Friday, showed up Sunday, and had a working bot in 40 minutes.
He wasn’t missing motivation.
He wasn’t missing intelligence.
He was missing a clear first step and someone to debug alongside.
That’s the whole thing.
You don’t need a team. You don’t need funding. You don’t need to relocate to a tech hub. You don’t even need to be an engineer.
You need judgment.
You need reps.
You need the willingness to ship something small and fix it live.
The size of the problem doesn’t matter. The size of the company doesn’t matter.
What matters is crossing zero to one.
That first user. That first dollar. That first proof that something you built creates value.
Once you cross that line, everything changes.
You stop asking “Can this work?”
You start asking “How do I improve it?”
When Everyone Can Build, Building Isn’t the Advantage
Building is no longer rare.
You can type plain English into a model and get working software. Landing pages. Bots. Internal tools. Mobile apps.
Execution is cheap. Judgment is not.
David’s two days of frustration before that Sunday session wasn’t a skill problem. It was a clarity problem. He didn’t know which step to take first. He didn’t know which errors mattered and which to ignore. He didn’t know when to push through and when to start over.
That’s what AI doesn’t give you.
The tool isn’t the bottleneck anymore.
Knowing what to build. Knowing what not to build. Knowing how to test something cheaply. Knowing when to ignore hype. Knowing when to double down.
AI removes friction. It does not remove responsibility.
That’s why I don’t care about being the first to try every tool.
I care about building judgment through repetition.
That’s what Sunday became. A forcing function for decision-making. A way to develop thinking, not just execution.
What This Substack Is
This is where I document how judgment gets built.
Not through theory — through weekly reps. Each post is a direct record of what we built, what broke, what the prompts actually looked like, and how I’m thinking about product and revenue in a world where execution is no longer the hard part.
You’re not getting a newsletter about the future of AI. You’re getting the actual workflow of someone navigating this shift in real time — making mistakes publicly, fixing them live, and sharing what’s worth keeping.
The goal isn’t for you to follow my exact path. It’s for you to see that the path exists, that it’s messier than the highlight reel, and that the only thing separating you from your first working product is a clear first step and the willingness to show up before you’re ready.
That’s the deal.
If you feel behind, you’re not late.
You just haven’t done the reps yet.
Reply and tell me what you’re building.
— Aj, @thevibefounder
Hey Ajay. How do I join whatsapp group and see what you’ve been building every Sunday.