In July 2023, my wife and I were finalizing a mortgage and were expecting a baby at the same time. It was a risky moment to leave a high-profile position with a good salary and benefits and go to something uncertain where everything depended on me.
Still, at age 36, I left my role as vice president of marketing at a San Francisco innovation management software company to become a solopreneur.
I felt confident because I already had the first people who believed in what I was doing, as well as belief in myself and what I was building: custom AI agents for other entrepreneurs and companies.
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My career started in marketing in the telecommunications industry before moving into sales management. In 2015, I started an ID verification company that I ran for two years – an experience that taught me a lot about entrepreneurship. Then I returned to the B2B SaaS world.
When ChatGPT launched in 2022, I quickly realized that it represented a huge paradigm shift for knowledge workers. Seeing its capabilities at an early stage and the speed at which it was developing, I decided it was a technology I needed to understand deeply.
In 2023, I did Google certifications on transformer models and other courses to learn the basics of how AI works. I also self-learned from YouTube, asking ChatGPT for technical explanations, and reading material I found through Google Deep Research.
The more I learned, the more I wanted to build. I learn best by doing, so I started experimenting with using AI in my everyday work, from go-to-market to content creation.
At the same time, I started helping self-employed people and small business owners who wanted to use AI to work more efficiently. Many of them were friends of mine who kept asking me if AI could help with this or that. So I started creating AI agents for them.
After I did this for a few people, my friends suggested that I try to do it professionally. I finally gathered the courage to start my own business again.
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My AI projects became a company after hours
After leaving my job in July 2023 and starting my business as an independent AI consultant, in 2024, the business had developed so much that I had to transform it into a limited liability company so that larger companies would feel more confident in signing contracts with me.
My clients often want to use AI agents to acquire customers and assess the quality of sales leads. The agents I have created are able to analyze new leads, research companies, evaluate them according to the ideal client criteria and inform the client whether the lead is a good fit.
In my own business, agents handle everything from handling incoming inquiries to building offers. For example, when someone fills out a form on my website, they automatically receive a personalized agent building roadmap. Another agent generates a quote and sends it along with a link to schedule an appointment on my calendar.
Then another agent creates an offer ready for signature. After our conversation, another agent updates the offer and related documents based on the findings from the meeting. This is only the stage of accepting the inquiry. Then, the agents responsible for settlements start the invoicing process.
These agents save me hours of work on every project. There's a whole AI workflow running in the background that I barely touch, but it makes me so much more efficient.
Thanks to AI, I can develop my company without employing people
AI allows me to scale the business without expanding my team. Otherwise, I would probably have to hire at least two additional people or outsource bid preparation, follow-up, invoicing and various administrative tasks. This would reduce margins.
Even though I work alone, I never feel lonely. There is a strong community of business founders in San Francisco. We collaborate on projects and transfer jobs to each other when someone runs out of bandwidth.
As AI advances accelerating and layoffs continue, I expect more and more people will become entrepreneurs – betting on themselves and becoming their own bosses.
The above text is a translation from American edition of Business Insider
