PSA FOR ANYONE STARTING A BUSINESS

Job description

PSA FOR ANYONE STARTING A BUSINESS: You are probably going to have to do some free work in the beginning. You’ll build portfolio pieces. You’ll overdeliver. You’ll answer questions you probably should have charged for. You’ll take a few projects too cheaply because you need proof of concept more than you need profit. Fine. But learn this distinction early: There is a difference between generosity you choose and access people learn to exploit. Because something very strange happens when you become good at what you do. People who know exactly how hard you worked to get there will still ask you for discounts. People who know you are climbing out of poverty will still ask. People who have watched you build a business from nothing will sit in your messages asking question after question—about AI, software, websites, strategy, marketing, whatever expertise you happen to possess—and somehow never notice that they are receiving consulting. And the psychology gets even uglier when the relationship exists primarily online. Someone comments on your posts. Messages you. Talks to you regularly. Creates the social texture of friendship. But friendship requires reciprocity. If most of your interest in me appears precisely when I possess something useful to you, that isn’t intimacy. That’s extraction wearing a friendship costume. And there’s another layer to this that is particularly fucking surreal for me. I use AI heavily. Everybody knows that. But I also speak into my phone constantly—usually in my car—and have for years. I write through speech. My natural cadence is recursive. I interrupt myself. I double back. I stack clauses. I use contrast, repetition, abrupt pivots, fragments, and then a clean declarative sentence to land the point. And now that cadence has been so thoroughly co-opted by AI-generated writing that people sometimes see the way I naturally speak and assume a machine wrote it. Think about how fucking strange that inversion is. AI was trained on human language. It learned human rhetorical patterns. Those patterns became ubiquitous. And now actual humans who naturally speak in some of those patterns are accused of imitating the machine that was imitating us. So yes, I use AI. Aggressively. But most of the time I am not sitting down asking a machine, “Please invent an opinion for me.” I’m talking. I’m dumping the thought exactly as it arrives—usually through voice-to-text—and using AI to help me structure, clean up, research, interrogate, compress, or expand what was already mine. The instrument is not the author of the fucking orchestra. And that distinction matters here because people have become incredibly comfortable simultaneously devaluing AI-assisted work while extracting AI expertise for free. They’ll sneer at the tool and then appear in my messages: What program did you use? How did you build that? Can you show me how? What prompt should I use? Can you look at mine? Which model should I use? Can you fix this? Quick question— There are very few “quick questions” when the answer depends on hundreds or thousands of hours spent learning the system well enough to answer you quickly. You are not paying for the 45 seconds it takes me to answer. You are asking for access to the architecture that made a 45-second answer possible. And here’s the part I wish more new business owners understood: When somebody tells you they “can’t afford” your services, pay attention to what happens next. Because sometimes they genuinely cannot afford them. I understand that better than most people. But sometimes “I can’t afford you” is followed by a $10,000 retreat. A vacation. A luxury purchase. An expensive event. And that’s perfectly fine. Spend your money wherever the fuck you want. But then the sentence wasn’t: “I can’t afford you.” It was: “Paying you isn’t important enough to me to allocate money toward it.” Those are radically different statements. And I would actually respect the