Why I’m rebuilding my whole business with AI

In 2023 the business I had spent over ten years building got cut down to almost nothing, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Not a slow fade either. One stretch of months where Google changed how it ranks pages, AI showed up and started answering the questions people used to click my articles to read, and the traffic that paid my bills walked out the door and did not come back. I had a travel blog called Goats on the Road, an SEO course people actually paid for, and a fly-fishing brand that hit six figures. Different sites, different audiences, same story. The floor went out from under all of it at roughly the same time.

This post is the long version of why I am now using the exact thing that broke me to rebuild from scratch. The mistakes, the two years I wasted being angry, and what I am actually building instead. If you are a regular person watching AI eat the thing you are good at, this is the one to read.

So if you are new here, I am Nick. For more than a decade I made my living building content businesses, and for a while it worked better than I had any right to expect. I made millions of dollars off websites and a YouTube channel and an audience that trusted what I put out. I am 40 now, I have never written a real line of code in my life, and I am rebuilding the whole thing in public so I do not end up another washed-up millennial who got skipped by the next wave. I film all of it on YouTube, the wins and the parts where I look like an idiot. Come along for the ride.

What I actually built, and what I actually lost

I want to be specific here, because the specifics are the whole point. When people hear someone say AI hurt their business they picture a guy who had a little side hustle and a few hundred dollars a month. That was not this.

Goats on the Road started as a travel blog and turned into a real company. We ranked for thousands of search terms, we sold an SEO course to other bloggers who wanted to do the same thing, and at one point I was teaching people the exact playbook that was paying my mortgage. Then I built a fly-fishing brand on the side, almost as an experiment, and it climbed to six figures. None of that was luck or one viral moment. It was years of writing, ranking, testing, and slowly figuring out how the internet decides who gets paid.

I had spent fifty grand of my own money on SEO courses over the years learning that game. I knew it cold. And that is exactly why 2023 hit so hard. It was not that I was bad at the thing. The thing itself stopped existing the way I knew it.

Here is the part that still stings a little. The skills did not get worse. I did not forget how to write or how to rank a page. The ground just moved. A search result that used to send me a thousand visitors started sending two hundred, because the answer was now sitting right at the top of the page, written by a machine, and nobody needed to click through to my site to get it. Multiply that across thousands of keywords and three businesses, and you can do the math on what happened to the income.

The two years I spent being angry at a piece of software

I am not going to dress this up. For about two years I hated AI, and I let that hatred run my decisions.

I blamed it for taking the work I loved. I sat in blogging Facebook groups with a few hundred other people who had built the same kind of businesses, and we all told each other the same comforting lie, that this was a phase, that Google would correct course, that the old way was coming back if we just held on and kept publishing. I wrote more articles into a hole. I refreshed my analytics like the numbers were going to apologize and turn around.

They did not turn around. The old way was not coming back. And every month I spent waiting for it to come back was a month I was not spending learning the thing that was actually going to matter. That is the part I am genuinely annoyed at myself about. Not that I got hit, everybody in my space got hit. That I sat there pissed off for two years instead of moving.

Anger is comfortable when something gets taken from you. It feels like doing something. It is not doing something. At some point I had to admit the tool I was cursing at was also the most capable thing I had ever had access to, and I was refusing to touch it out of spite.

The turn: stop fighting it, start using it

So I made a decision, and it was honestly the least dramatic decision of my life even though it changed everything. I decided to stop fighting AI and start using it.

Not use it to pump out more articles into the same dying machine. That was the trap. I had been trying to use a new tool to prop up an old, broken business. The real move was to point it at something completely different and build a new machine entirely.

The plan is simple to say and hard to do. Use AI to build apps and software that I can actually sell. Real products people pay for, not another course about how to make courses. Instead of renting attention from Google and praying the algorithm likes me this quarter, build a thing that does a job, charge for it, and own the relationship with the person paying me.

And here is the wall I had to walk straight through. I cannot code. I have never been able to code. A year ago, the sentence that man with no coding background is going to build and sell software would have been a joke, and I would have been the one laughing at it. The only reason it is not a joke anymore is that the tools got good enough that I can describe what I want in plain English and have it built, then tested, then fixed when it breaks.

That does not mean it is easy or that the AI does the thinking for me. Most days it feels like managing a team of very fast, very literal employees who will build exactly the wrong thing if I describe it lazily. My job turned into knowing what to build, breaking it into pieces small enough to hand off, and having enough taste to tell when what came back is good and when it is junk. The coding is the part I farm out. The judgment is the part I have to bring, and most of that judgment came from the decade I already spent building businesses.

What I am building right now

Right now I am building a handful of small software products, all with AI, all in public. None of them are my big swing-for-the-fences billion dollar idea, and I am fine with that. A million people have probably thought of each one. I am building them anyway because shipping something small and real teaches me more than planning something huge and perfect ever will.

There is a YouTube thumbnail app that takes my own photos and turns them into thumbnails that actually get clicked, trained on the styles of creators who are great at it. There is a video editor that takes a long talking-head vlog, cuts out all my mistakes and retakes, and adds the kind of motion graphics I used to pay an editor for. There is a tool that takes a finished video and publishes it to YouTube with a proper title, description, chapters, and tags already done. Boring problems I personally have, that I was either paying for or doing by hand.

That is the filter, by the way. I am not building software for a market I read about in a tweet. I am building tools for the exact problems I hit every week running my own content, because at least then I know one customer is real. Me.

Where this is going

I do not fully know yet, and I think pretending I do would make this whole thing dishonest.

The goal is to get one or two of these products to the point where real people pay for them every month, and to stack enough of those up that they replace the income the blogs used to throw off. Maybe one of them gets big. Maybe none of them do and the value turns out to be everything I learn building them, which then becomes the next thing. I have rebuilt from zero before. I know how that part works even when I do not know the destination.

What I am sure of is the direction. The people who win the next ten years are not going to be the ones who fought AI the longest. They are going to be the ones who learned to point it at a real problem the fastest. I wasted two years finding that out. You do not have to.

The honest part

I am not going to sell you a course on this. I do not have a five-step system, and anyone who is packaging one this early is selling you a map of a country they have not visited yet.

What I have is a real situation that a lot of people my age are in. The thing I was good at got disrupted, I have no formal tech background, and my options were to either complain about it until I become irrelevant or learn to build with the new tools and stay in the game. I picked the second one a couple years later than I should have.

This blog is the written half of that. The videos cover the builds as they happen, the fast version with the screen recordings. The posts here are where I slow down and think out loud about what is working, what broke, and what I got wrong, in more detail than a video has room for.

I genuinely do not know if this ends with me building something big or embarrassing myself in public. Realistically it will be a mix of both, on camera, for everyone to see. Either way I am documenting all of it, mistakes included.

If you are watching the same wave come for your work and you have been telling yourself it will pass, take it from a guy who told himself that for two years. It will not pass. But you are not as far behind as you think, and the tools have never been this friendly to people who cannot code. Come along for the ride.