When you are in the early days of building a product, you don't have the budget for massive operational bloat. You are forced to design every touchpoint from first principles. You sit down, map out what a perfect, magical experience looks like, and you build backward from there.
But as companies scale, they compromise.
Right now, I see a lot of founders making a classic mistake with AI and automation: they are taking broken, bureaucratic, legacy processes and simply layering software on top of them.
They ask: "How do we make our manual data entry 20% faster?"
