On hallucinations, real people, and deep thinking

As an entrepreneur by heart, I’ve shaped a good chunk of my life around building businesses, processes, management workflows, recruitment, sales and marketing funnels, technical proficiency and automation.

Ever since my years as a kid, tech was a rising category. Organic search and social media were booming. Digital entrepreneurship was on the rise.

While there are always nuances in launching businesses or growth strategies, the general SaaS playbook for Hotmail or Dropbox or Airbnb could have been replicated for the most part in 2015, 2018, 2020, 2022. If you read Lean Startup by Eric Ries, the principles were still valid in the early 2020s.

This no longer holds true in 2025.

The clash of organic + AI overviews, the entire AI pivot for content marketing, Cursor and Bolt building apps, and oversaturation of the product space - all of that has populated the web and made both the product space AND building an audience a completely different turn of events.

The fact that we can build a simplified CRM in a day without coding skills will never replace HubSpot or Salesforce, but a chunk of their audience doesn’t need the full suite of bells and whistles.

And with many hundreds of CRMs, how products got launched 20 years ago has changed dramatically.

The PPC and SEM spaces have evolved with noise and oversaturation, to the extent of banner blindness.

We live in different times

And nearly everything I’ve been learning, applying, and optimizing for over the past 2 decades is challenged today.

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