What happened when I let AI run my business

Let me tell you something. Less than three weeks after I started my AI company, I almost killed it.

Not because nobody wanted it. Because people did. I did not expect to get customers so quickly. I got them quickly, and that changed my whole perspective as an owner.

I recorded this in early March, back when I was a one-man startup with a full-time job, a full personal life, and my first product, Kiyomi, which looked nothing like what Kiyomi is today. What follows is what went wrong, what I did about it, and what AI actually took off my plate.

Lesson one: you can't be the support desk at 2 a.m.

At first I was that founder who was close to every customer. You could email me directly. You could work with me directly. I was trying to answer every support email, no matter what time it was.

It was killing me. It was draining me. It wasn't working.

So I went to my AI team and said: I can't keep doing this. I need to sleep. I need to function. I need to spend time with my wife. And they built out a whole support page, with an AI support assistant named Jordan answering customers.

Here's a true story. Not long after it went live, I was away for about an hour and didn't check anything the entire time. A customer on a free trial was having trouble getting set up. The support assistant helped him end to end. When I finally checked my email, he had upgraded and paid in full, because the support helped him so much.

And here's the funny part. Customers now had a better experience with the support page than they would have had with me. Because I'm a human. I have to sleep, I have to eat, I have a personal life. I can't always get to you. Jordan can always get to you.

Lesson two: stability is a feature

This is the one that almost sank me.

I would find every little issue and push an update. I was shipping updates every single day. If you were a customer, there was an update almost every time you logged in. In about two weeks my product went from a web app to a Telegram bot to a different web app to a command-line tool. Seven different versions.

Customers could not keep up. Some people bought it, downloaded it, and got something different from what I had advertised, because I was actively working on it.

You can't do that. You'll destroy the confidence in your product.

On camera you could see the text in my tool looked a little jumbled. Will I fix it? Yes. When? When the right time comes. Because it produced results every time, and if I slow down and fix things when they're needed, I fix them once, without shocking everybody every time they log in.

Lesson three: stop building, start selling

When you learn how to build with AI, you get developer brain. You come up with new ideas every single day.

Here's the receipt. About seventy-five percent of the updates I shipped, nobody asked for. I just thought they were cool. People were perfectly happy with the simpler version.

So let me say it plain. A product you release with bugs beats a perfect product that nobody sees. Have you ever seen ChatGPT give you an error? Gemini? Claude? Down for hours? We all have. And we still use them. Your customers come in knowing there will be bugs. They want the product because they know you're going to fix it.

Stop building. Start selling.

How I actually get AI to do the work

While I told that story, I had my AI build three things for a sample cleaning company: a website, an invoice template, and a follow-up email template. Here's the method, and it works in any AI tool, Claude, Codex or anything else.

• Don't ask for everything at once. "Build me a website, an email system and my invoices" will overload any of these tools. One thing at a time.
• Plan it in a file first. Talk it out, then have the AI write the plan as a markdown file, which is just a plain text file. Point it at the file and say: "Read this, tell me you understand it, and wait for my approval before you build."
• Give it context. Don't just say "build." Tell it who the business is and what you want.
• Look before it goes live. I had it open each piece as a local file on my computer, so I could review and edit before pushing anything public. I learned that one the hard way, fixing things while customers were watching.
• Save the workflow. At the end I said: "Save this entire workflow as a file on my desktop so we don't have to work through it again." Next time, you hand it that file and it follows the same process.

The website took longest because it had the most pages. The invoice template came out fast, and the print button even worked.

What AI did and didn't do

AI took support off my back at hours I couldn't be there. It built real business pieces in minutes. But it didn't decide what to build or when to stop. That was me. This technology is amazing, but it's not a human being. You still have to plan, you still have to give it context, and you still have to judge.

What this means for you

If you'd rather not be your own 2 a.m. support desk, that's work the RMDW team does in our custom builds: AI that answers your customers and your calls, the website, and the automations behind it, so you can get back to running the business.