Everyone talks about building the next unicorn. But what if that's the wrong goal entirely?

Here's a different mental model worth considering. Instead of spending 5 years chasing one product to $10M ARR, what if you built 10 20 smaller products (each generating $10k $50k MRR) managed entirely by AI agents?

An agent wrote a fix for a bug and included a passing test. I was suspicious, so I reverted the fix and ran the test again.

It still passed. The assertion was checking a mock that always returned true, regardless of the code.

I logged every indexing notification for 58 days. 551 total. 187 were for pages that had already been indexed weeks earlier.

My sitemap was regenerating on every deploy. The API kept seeing "new" URLs that hadn't changed. I gated the sitemap build behind a content hash check.

I asked Claude Code to rename a function across the codebase. It found 12 files, made the change, and reported success.

A thirteenth file sat in a directory outside its search scope. No warning.

We bootstrapped our SaaS to $30k MRR with a very simple pricing model. But last year, we started landing larger mid-market clients. These clients all had one thing in common: they refused to use our automated Stripe checkout. They demanded to be billed via custom invoices, with net-30 terms, purchase order (PO) numbers, and specific line items for their procurement departments.

Because we desperately wanted the revenue, we said yes to every custom billing request. We didn't want to spend engineering time building an enterprise billing system, so my co-founder and I just did it manually.

I finally tracked our time last month. We spent 40 hours (an entire work week) manually generating PDFs, chasing down PO numbers, emailing finance departments, and reconciling payments. We were acting as our own collections agency.

Our CFO (who is our part-time advisor) looked at the numbers and pointed out something terrifying: If we factored in the opportunity cost of the engineering hours we weren't shipping, and the delayed cash flow from net-30 terms, we were actually losing money on those enterprise deals. We were so focused on the top-line revenue that we ignored the massive operational drag.

After launch day, something interesting happens. You start seeing clearly all the things you should have done before it.

The most common regrets I hear:

Quick one for anyone doing outreach.

I've spent a lot of years around CRMs and email setups, and this comes up every single time someone starts cold emailing. Send from your main domain, or buy a lookalike domain just for outreach?

They paid more than anyone else. They also consumed more of my time than everyone else combined.

I fired them. Politely, with a transition plan, and a real reason they could understand.

Someone bought my product a year and a half ago. Paid once. Never upgraded. Never asked for anything.

Then they emailed me out of nowhere with a detailed explanation of a problem they'd solved with it. Something I'd never thought it could do. They'd built a whole process around it and wanted to tell me.