There was a time when someone who baked bread for a living was, first and foremost, a baker. Of course, they still had to buy ingredients, calculate prices, deal with customers and make sure the bills got paid. Running a business was never just about doing the thing you were good at. But somewhere along the way, the job description of a founder became absurdly long.
Today, you don’t just make the product or provide the service. You are also expected to understand branding, build a website, create content, run social media, write copy, take photos, send newsletters, understand SEO, manage your finances, run ads, read analytics and somehow still have time left to do the thing you started the business to do.
Luckily, there is an entire industry helping you do it all yourself.
And now there is AI, which makes an even bigger promise possible: You can not only do everything yourself. You can do things yourself that you don’t actually know how to do.
- You can generate a business plan without knowing how to write one.
- Create a marketing strategy without being a marketer.
- Write a month of content before lunch.
- Build a website over the weekend.
And I don’t think any of this is necessarily a bad thing. It has lowered barriers that genuinely needed lowering.
People can test ideas without enormous budgets. Small businesses have access to capabilities that were once reserved for much larger companies. Someone with a great idea and limited resources can build things that would have required an entire team not very long ago. The problem starts when access to doing something gets confused with knowing whether you should be doing it at all.
We created tools to make founders more independent. Then we created more tools to make all that independence less overwhelming. And now we have AI to make using all those tools faster. Yet the founder is still sitting in the middle of it all, making decisions about disciplines they were never supposed to become experts in.
Maybe the more useful version of independence isn’t doing everything yourself.
Know what makes sense to do yourself.
Know where a good tool is enough.
Know where AI can save you three hours.
Know when the smartest decision is to stop learning somebody else’s profession and pay them to do their job.
Do yourself what makes sense to do yourself. Get help where judgment or expertise actually matters.
That may be less exciting than another promise that you can build an entire company from your laptop for $49 a month. But it leaves considerably more time to actually build the company.