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Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.

I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.

The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.

But subtraction has a ceiling, and you hit it faster than you expect. Once the obvious tasks are automated, savings flatten and you are left with a business that is cheaper to run and no more valuable than it was before. Worse, you have trained yourself to see your company as a pile of tasks to be eliminated rather than a set of judgments only you can make.

The founders pulling ahead are running a different play. Microsoft studied AI users this year and found that the most effective ones were not the people completing more tasks faster. They were the people who stopped asking what tasks define their job and started asking what outcomes they were now positioned to drive. The agents handle the mechanics. The human moves up the stack to intent, taste, and judgment.

That is not a soft distinction. It is the entire game.

Automation raises the stakes on judgment; it does not remove them.

Here is the part the cost-cutting crowd misses. The more work your agents execute, the more expensive your mistakes in judgment become. A bad decision used to ship at human speed, caught by the three people it passed through on the way out. A bad decision handed to an agent ships at machine speed, across every channel, before anyone blinks.

You do not get to delegate the judgment. You get to delegate the labor — and then you are more accountable for the judgment than before, because there is no longer a layer of humans between your intent and the market.

This is why founders who treat agents as a license to disengage are setting a trap for themselves. They are scaling their own blind spots. An agent will execute a flawed strategy with perfect efficiency and total confidence. It will never walk into your office and say this feels wrong.

What to automate, and what to guard.

The discipline is not complicated, but it requires resisting the pressure to automate by default.

Automate the mechanics. Research, transcription, data retrieval, first drafts, lead enrichment, scheduling — the repeatable workflows that drain hours and require no taste. Start with one workflow, give it narrow permissions, keep a human approval checkpoint, and measure what actually changes over thirty days. The teams that win here keep the stack small and the workflow documented before adding complexity. Stable systems beat sleek demos.

Guard the judgment. The decisions about what your company stands for, which customers you will not serve, when the data is telling you something the model cannot see, what tradeoff is worth making and what line you will not cross. These are not inefficiencies to be optimized away. They are the reason your business exists rather than a competitor’s. Microsoft’s own data names the limit clearly: agents still fall short on tasks requiring deep empathy, emotional intelligence, and nuanced social understanding. That is not a temporary gap. That is your job description.

The strategic move in 2026 is to use agents to buy back the hours you were spending on mechanics, and then to spend those hours on the judgment work you were too busy to do well. Most founders will do the first half and pocket the time as savings. The ones who compound will reinvest it.

Automation is becoming a baseline, not an advantage. When every business in your category can deploy the same agents at the same cost, the agents stop being a differentiator. What remains scarce is exactly what cannot be automated: the quality of your judgment, the clarity of your intent, the taste with which you decide what is worth doing at all.

So by all means, deploy the agents. Cut the busywork. Reclaim the hours. But do not mistake a cheaper company for a stronger one. The founders who win the next few years will not be the ones who automated the most. They will be the ones who automated everything except the thinking — and then got dramatically better at the thinking.

That is the asset no agent can run while you sleep. Make sure you are still the one holding it.

Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.

I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.

The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Portland, Oregon-based entrepreneur Lauren McDuffie, 42. McDuffie and her cousin Rachel Albers, 49, co-founded Dressy, a line of superfood-forward salad dressing mixes that can be prepared quickly and easily at home, this past June. Following a $12,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign, Dressy launched as a side hustle and made $2,500 within its first few weeks. Now the business is projected to see about $30,000 in revenue by the end of the year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
Before launching Dressy, I spent more than a decade building a career as a food writer, recipe developer, cookbook author and photographer. Through my recipe website, My Kitchen Little, and my cookbooks, I worked to help people make home cooking feel more approachable and interesting. 

Running a recipe website gave me firsthand experience at building an online brand, creating content and understanding how busy people actually use their kitchens. Dressy grew very naturally out of that work; it felt less like swapping careers and more like solving a problem that had been bugging me for years. 

Rachel, who is an attorney by education, had ended a long career working as a political consultant and was preparing to send one of her sons off to college. She shared with me over coffee one morning that she was ready for something new, and I realized that working with her — combining our different skill sets, experience, interests and aptitudes — would make for a great partnership. 

Starting a superfood-packed side hustle

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
We officially launched Dressy on June 1, 2026, but I first had the idea in the fall of 2024. Again and again, I noticed the same disconnect: People were willing to make homemade pasta sauces and fresh breads from scratch, but when it came to salad dressing, even enthusiastic home cooks almost always reached for a store-bought bottle. 

I realized it wasn’t because people preferred bottled dressing. It was because homemade dressings, while mostly simple, still require keeping a long list of fresh ingredients on hand, unless you just use oil and vinegar all the time — which is great but somewhat boring after a while. So I started asking myself what homemade dressing might look like if it were designed (or re-designed, really) for modern life.

The answer eventually became Dressy: clean, flavor-forward, superfood-boosted dressing mixes that let people make fresh dressing in less than a minute with just one staple ingredient they likely already have. Each Dressy pouch contains everything you need to create a fresh, flavorful dressing at home. Our flavors – Hello, Ranch, Green Goodness, and Sundress – are made with thoughtfully chosen ingredients and designed to deliver the flavor of homemade.

Investing $30,000 to launch the side hustle

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money/investment did it take to launch?
The first step was trademarking our name. Not to be all, “it came to me in a dream,” but it actually did. So, I scooped it up. The next step was validating that the problem was real. Before we worried about packaging or branding, we spent time asking if we were solving something people actually struggled with. I’d spent a long time watching others embrace homemade versions of almost everything — except salad dressing. That observation gave me enough confidence to believe there was a real opportunity to rethink the category.

From there, we focused on building the brand very thoughtfully, keeping operations as lean as possible and investing in things that we truly saw as mission critical. We invested in recipe development with food scientists that involved a lot of testing and iterating, as getting our flavors just right was a non-negotiable.

Every decision has to earn its place

It was also extremely important to me to invest in custom packaging and branding right out of the gate, and we did so by working with a fantastic Portland-based graphic design firm (Perspektiiv). We began sourcing high-quality ingredients and focused on obtaining them from local companies to keep shipping costs as low as possible. Because Dressy is a food product, there was also a significant amount of (less exciting) operational and structural work behind the scenes, from regulatory requirements, labeling and researching commercial production options to finding the right suppliers and manufacturing partners. 

By the time Dressy launched, we’d invested approximately $30,000 into the business. The majority has been self-funded, with about $10,000 coming from a small friends-and-family fundraising round. When you’re spending your own money, every decision has to earn its place, so we fully gamed things out all along the way. I’d like to think this approach shaped the bones of the company in ways that will pay off down the line.

Scaling a CPG business with intenti0n

Are there any free or paid resources that have been especially helpful for you in starting and running this business? 
One of the most valuable resources early on was simply talking to people who have done it before. We sought advice from experienced CPG founders and fractional consultants who were generous enough to share what they’d learned, and those conversations helped us avoid some costly mistakes. 

We also chose to work with the Food Innovation Center at Oregon State University, which was an incredible resource throughout our product development process. Many land-grant universities and schools with strong agricultural or food science programs offer benchtop product development services, food safety expertise, and both technical and business support for entrepreneurs, often at a much lower cost than private consulting firms. For anyone thinking about starting a food business, I would absolutely encourage them to see what resources their state’s universities have available.

We also partnered with the consulting firm, FoodWit, whose guidance gave us confidence that our packaging and labels met FDA requirements before launch. Having knowledgeable experts in areas where we aren’t specialists allows us to move much more confidently.

More than anything, though, and at the risk of sounding platitudinal, I think curiosity has been our greatest resource. We’re deeply aware of how much we don’t know when it comes to running and scaling a CPG business. So, we ask a bunch of questions and try to talk to as many people as we can all of the time. We read a lot, scan the forums over on StartupCPG (also a great resource) and try not to assume we have to figure everything out on our own. Every conversation with someone a few steps ahead of us shortens our learning curve.

Don’t rush to a quick fix when things go wrong

Can you recall a specific instance when something went very wrong — how did you fix it?
One of our biggest early setbacks came before launch when the commercial kitchen we’d planned to use for first run production unexpectedly became unavailable. Overnight, we lost the manufacturing plan we’d spent months preparing around and had to find an entirely new path forward.

It was tempting to look for a quick fix, but we’d been very intentional about staying lean in the early stages of the business. Rather than rushing into a co-manufacturer before we felt we’d truly established product-market fit, we doubled down on our original philosophy of protecting our capital and proving the concept first. We found another commercial kitchen, adapted our process and kept production in-house.

Raising $12k on Kickstarter, making over $2k in weeks

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the side hustle earn?
We’re still in the early stages of building the business — it’s only month two — so for us success right now isn’t only, or even primarily, measured in revenue. We’re focused on repeat customers, word-of-mouth sales, retailer conversations and proving people genuinely come back once they’ve tried the product.

The month prior to launching, we successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign, raising $12,000 while also being selected as a coveted “Project We Love” by the editors. This was a fantastic early signal that people would respond positively to our brand and products. 

We launched in June very softly, with lowkey announcements, but still made a quick $2,500 within the first few weeks, selling out of our limited-edition summer flavor, Sundress. We are preparing to roll out a local retail launch next month, will be selling at the Portland Night Market this fall and are kicking off a sustained, focused advertising push as well. As such, our projected 2026 revenue (first six months post launch) is somewhere around $30,000.

Steady and controlled growth and revenue

What does growth and revenue look like now? 
The words that come to mind are steady and controlled. We’ve been very careful not to overstretch our skis when it comes to our operational and production capacities, so that’s what I mean when I say we launched quietly. But transparently, this decision was largely due to the fact that we’re both moms and have very busy schedules in the summer that involve a lot of travel. That’s just the truth of it, and we mutually agreed to avoid hitting the gas until the busy season had passed. 

At this point, though, we’ve had two months to understand how consumers respond when they discover our dressing mixes organically — and the response has been incredible. I’m excited to see what the fall season brings now that we can take our feet off the brakes and let it rip. 

No two days look alike while running a side hustle

What does a typical week working on this side hustle look like?
Right now, Dressy is still in its early stages, so no two days look alike. Some weeks I spend time in our commercial kitchen making product, while others I focus on recipe development, photography, social media marketing, customer service or meeting with partners. Since it’s just the two of us running the show right now, we wear a lot of hats.

That said, I’ve learned that being productive isn’t the same thing as being busy. At this stage, I’m constantly asking myself what will actually move the business forward the most. Sometimes that’s developing a new recipe and sometimes it’s simply having a conversation that influences how I think about the business. I’ve become much more intentional about protecting my energy and focusing on the work that creates the greatest momentum.

The opposite of a grind — and the value in better questions

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
I’ve wanted to create a brand and business like this for the majority of my life. So witnessing this thing bloom that’s mostly lived inside my head is honestly thrilling. I still kind of can’t believe it. That is easily the thing I enjoy the most. That and running it alongside Rachel. We’ve lived on opposite coasts for our entire lives, but my family moved to the Portland area three years ago, and running this business with her has been so much fun. It’s taken a process that is often described as a grind and made it the exact opposite of that.

What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
The advice I have is a product of having started multiple food businesses, from my career publishing books to my work as a food blogger to now building a CPG company.

Don’t wait until you think you’re ready to ask better questions. Just start talking and don’t stop; make yourself a student of whatever it is you’re trying to achieve or become, and don’t turn that setting off. Find people who are five steps ahead of you, not 50, and ask them anything and everything you want to know. They’re usually the ones who remember exactly what you’re struggling with and what you’re feeling, and they’re often incredibly generous with what they’ve learned. 

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Portland, Oregon-based entrepreneur Lauren McDuffie, 42. McDuffie and her cousin Rachel Albers, 49, co-founded Dressy, a line of superfood-forward salad dressing mixes that can be prepared quickly and easily at home, this past June. Following a $12,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign, Dressy launched as a side hustle and made $2,500 within its first few weeks. Now the business is projected to see about $30,000 in revenue by the end of the year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
Before launching Dressy, I spent more than a decade building a career as a food writer, recipe developer, cookbook author and photographer. Through my recipe website, My Kitchen Little, and my cookbooks, I worked to help people make home cooking feel more approachable and interesting. 

Running a recipe website gave me firsthand experience at building an online brand, creating content and understanding how busy people actually use their kitchens. Dressy grew very naturally out of that work; it felt less like swapping careers and more like solving a problem that had been bugging me for years. 

In science class, you probably learned that rust forms when iron reacts with water and air. Now a tech startup is turning that same reaction into a battery. Form Energy calls the clean-energy process “reversible rusting.” The battery takes in oxygen and turns iron into rust to discharge power, then reverses the process to recharge. The company just raised $750 million, pushing its total funding past $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The batteries last longer than the Energizer Bunny. While standard lithium-ion batteries run for a few hours at a time, Form’s can keep going for 100 hours straight, long enough to get a utility through a multi-day grid emergency like a winter storm.

The money is going toward ramping up manufacturing at Form Energy’s Weirton, West Virginia plant and its first wave of commercial projects, including a 300-megawatt installation with utility Xcel Energy tied to a Google data center in Minnesota. Form’s list of projects lined up to build has quadrupled this year, from 20 to 80 gigawatt-hours, driven largely by the AI data center boom straining the power grid.

In science class, you probably learned that rust forms when iron reacts with water and air. Now a tech startup is turning that same reaction into a battery. Form Energy calls the clean-energy process “reversible rusting.” The battery takes in oxygen and turns iron into rust to discharge power, then reverses the process to recharge. The company just raised $750 million, pushing its total funding past $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The batteries last longer than the Energizer Bunny. While standard lithium-ion batteries run for a few hours at a time, Form’s can keep going for 100 hours straight, long enough to get a utility through a multi-day grid emergency like a winter storm.

The money is going toward ramping up manufacturing at Form Energy’s Weirton, West Virginia plant and its first wave of commercial projects, including a 300-megawatt installation with utility Xcel Energy tied to a Google data center in Minnesota. Form’s list of projects lined up to build has quadrupled this year, from 20 to 80 gigawatt-hours, driven largely by the AI data center boom straining the power grid.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Pranitha Patil, co-founder and chief business officer of preventive health membership platform Function, now valued at $2.5 billion. Function, co-founded by Jonathan Swerdlin (CEO), Dr. Mark Hyman (chief medical officer), Seth Weisfeld (chief design officer) and Dan Swerdlin (general counsel), provides access to more than 160 lab tests, advanced MRI and CT imaging, and AI-powered insights that help members understand what their results mean and which actions to take next. The membership costs $365 annually, compared to roughly $15,000 for comparable testing purchased independently, per the company. The piece has been edited for length and clarity. 

 The journey to Function started way before 2021, when we officially launched. I experienced a few diagnoses in my teenage years and early 20s. I was diagnosed with PCOS and was pre-diabetic. My HbA1c was always teetering in the 6% range, and I had genetically high cholesterol. I was a young South Asian woman. There wasn’t enough clinical data showing what to do with somebody like me and my picture. The solution was either, “You’re going to live a pretty low-quality life,” or “You have to fix all these things yourself.” I really did feel like I was on my own, tracking my blood work and trying to figure it out. The healthcare system is set up so that you only go once you have a problem. Had I seen these signs way earlier, these markers being elevated, I would’ve done something about it. 

Dropping out of Harvard to build Function

I was at Harvard studying for a master’s in design engineering when I came up with the idea to develop a comprehensive preventive health platform. Initially, I thought a product like it must already exist somewhere in the world, but I couldn’t find it. Then I met my co-founder and CEO, Jonathan Swerdlin, and was like, “This product needs to exist.” It was a no-brainer; there wasn’t a lot of hesitation.

I connected with the rest of the co-founding team and had a lot of confidence in the people I’d be working with and the passion behind what we were building. I ended up dropping out of the Harvard program early to bring the company to life. Everything clicked. As co-founders, we have different backgrounds, but we were all driven by giving people the opportunity to own their health. That mission hasn’t changed in the five and a half years since Function’s founding.

The typical annual physical gives you a snapshot of your health at one point in time. Function offers people the most cutting-edge information, and it’s ongoing. 

Pitching a big long-term vision to investors

We wanted to start with lab testing in blood and urine, but we always envisioned doing so much more. So the most challenging part in the early days — and this is true of building any company — was convincing investors of the bigger vision when it wasn’t here yet. For us, it was like, “Hey, we’re starting with the most comprehensive lab testing you’ve ever seen, and if you think about that data set that has never been done before, and you add things like imaging, and combine it with AI, and have other types of data sets, picture how incredible that could be.” Investors connected with our ability to communicate this big vision. Before long, we got traction for our Series A. Then the company took off from there. Now Function is valued at $2.5 billion.

Our goal is to reach eight billion people as quickly as possible. We mean that; that’s been the throughline for us since day one. AI is helping us achieve that. We use the technology in a few different ways. 

Using AI for communication and medical intelligence

We have our private AI chat, which allows members to communicate with AI after they’ve gotten their results to build a plan, learn what’s going on and get a deeper understanding of what to do next. 

Additionally, we’re building a medical intelligence lab that’s bringing together all different types of data — from labs, images, wearable devices, past medical records, etc. — to create this longitudinal picture of someone. That information is summarized in a way that the average person on the street can actually do something about it. Since that hasn’t been done before, the only way to do it is with AI. We’ve got researchers, scientists, clinicians, coders and people who really understand AI working to bring technology and medicine together and make it as clean, accessible and actionable as possible for somebody today. 

We’re in our act two as a company. For act one to be successful, we had to lay the foundation with the labs. The lab piece had to be accurate and correct, and get as many people in the door as possible multiple times a year. That behavior shift happened. Now, people are excited about seeing how their labs have changed, or their biological age has come down. But we always knew there was more to build.

Acquisitions were critical to Function’s growth

We knew we would need to make some acquisitions to scale, which is why we added imaging, supplement intelligence through SuppCo and home blood draws with Getlabs. It would take too long to build everything in-house. And we needed to make it seamless for people to take action. If we’re telling you to take a supplement or get your blood drawn, we have to make it easy. 

We’re never going back to a time where we don’t have access to this data. Once you open Pandora’s box, it’s here. That’s a great responsibility, but it’s also such a cool time to live in because we have the opportunity to actually change health, not healthcare, but the actual health of a population.

When I think about the future, I’m reimagining everything we’ve known about how we interact with our health. This is a new set of expectations and a new set of information. Historically, this has been so severely disconnected, and you’re playing insane Tetris trying to figure out one thing about yourself. I am so excited about a world, whether that’s in three to five years or 10 years, or even sooner, where people can detect a problem before it becomes an actual problem, take action and have a strong relationship with their health. We deserve that. If we can make it that much easier for people, then we’ve done something right. 

Building in healthcare for lasting change

I pinch myself that this is the company we built, and so much is still possible. It’s an incredible time to be building in healthcare and see the change from humans around you. So many people want to build in health. The first thing I would say is, if you’re interested in building in this space, it is most certainly bigger than yourself. The work is bigger than you, and the sooner you realize that, the better, because it humbles you in the best way. 

But on the flip side of that, healthcare is also one of the messiest industries because you’re working with old-school systems. So acknowledge that. If you’re building for the initial stages, don’t focus so much on what others are doing. If you have an idea that you believe is actually novel and should be in the world, just get started. That’s what someone told me in the early days with Function. You just have to get started. You can iterate. No one’s grading you. There’s so much to be done in this industry compared to the financial industry or any other industry. We’re always 10 years behind most of the big industries. With AI, we have the opportunity to catch up really quickly, but remain human and empathetic.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Pranitha Patil, co-founder and chief business officer of preventive health membership platform Function, now valued at $2.5 billion. Function, co-founded by Jonathan Swerdlin (CEO), Dr. Mark Hyman (chief medical officer), Seth Weisfeld (chief design officer) and Dan Swerdlin (general counsel), provides access to more than 160 lab tests, advanced MRI and CT imaging, and AI-powered insights that help members understand what their results mean and which actions to take next. The membership costs $365 annually, compared to roughly $15,000 for comparable testing purchased independently, per the company. The piece has been edited for length and clarity. 

 The journey to Function started way before 2021, when we officially launched. I experienced a few diagnoses in my teenage years and early 20s. I was diagnosed with PCOS and was pre-diabetic. My HbA1c was always teetering in the 6% range, and I had genetically high cholesterol. I was a young South Asian woman. There wasn’t enough clinical data showing what to do with somebody like me and my picture. The solution was either, “You’re going to live a pretty low-quality life,” or “You have to fix all these things yourself.” I really did feel like I was on my own, tracking my blood work and trying to figure it out. The healthcare system is set up so that you only go once you have a problem. Had I seen these signs way earlier, these markers being elevated, I would’ve done something about it. 

Dropping out of Harvard to build Function

I was at Harvard studying for a master’s in design engineering when I came up with the idea to develop a comprehensive preventive health platform. Initially, I thought a product like it must already exist somewhere in the world, but I couldn’t find it. Then I met my co-founder and CEO, Jonathan Swerdlin, and was like, “This product needs to exist.” It was a no-brainer; there wasn’t a lot of hesitation.

Every discovery call I run reaches the same two questions. The first is “will this work?” The second is “what should SEO cost?”

Founders ask the second one nervously, because they’ve usually collected three proposals that quote three wildly different numbers for what sounds like the same service. One says $700 a month. One says $3,500. One says $9,000. Nobody explains the gap.

I price SEO deals every week at my agency, and I’ve reviewed dozens of competitor proposals that prospects forward to me. So here’s the honest breakdown I give every founder who asks — including the parts that don’t flatter my industry.

What the market actually charges

Start with real data instead of sales decks. Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO professionals and found that 78.2% charge a monthly retainer, making it the dominant pricing model. The most common retainer bracket sits at $501 to $1,000 per month, but averages tell a different story: agencies average around $3,209 per month, while freelancers come in near $1,349.

Experience widens the gap further. The same survey found that providers with five to 10 years in business charge more than double what newcomers charge. Scope matters too — SEOs serving local markets average about $1,557 per month, while those competing nationally or globally average $3,474.

So when your three proposals say $700, $3,500 and $9,000, none of them is automatically a scam. They’re quoting three different products that happen to share a name. Your job is to figure out which product your business actually needs.

What you’re really paying for at each price level

Under $1,000 a month, you’re buying hours — a few of them. That budget covers a freelancer or offshore team handling the basics: some on-page fixes, a blog post or two and a monthly report. For a local business in a low-competition market, that can genuinely be enough.

Between $2,000 and $5,000, you’re buying a system. Real keyword strategy, content production, technical monitoring and link acquisition, usually with multiple specialists touching your account. This is where most growing businesses with real competition need to be.

Above $5,000, you’re buying competitive firepower. Enterprise sites, national terms, aggressive content programs and digital PR live here. This is the natural tier for a B2B software company chasing national commercial terms against competitors with seven-figure marketing budgets — at that level, most of the money funds content and earned media because anything smaller wouldn’t even register in the market.

The trap isn’t any specific price. The trap is paying $800 for a problem that requires $4,000 of work, then concluding SEO doesn’t work.

I see this pattern constantly in the proposals prospects forward to me. A business pays $800 a month for a year and gets two generic blog posts a month plus a ranking report full of keywords nobody actually searches. Traffic barely moves, the owner decides SEO is a scam and the honest scope for their market was closer to $3,500 all along — not because SEO is expensive, but because their competitors were already spending it.

The three signs you’re overpaying

Price alone never tells you if you’re overpaying. Deliverables do.

First, you’re overpaying if the invoice buys activity instead of strategy. A retainer that promises “four blog posts and 10 backlinks” per month is selling volume, not outcomes. Quantity guarantees are the easiest thing in SEO to fake and the least connected to revenue.

Second, you’re overpaying if nobody can explain the work in plain English. Ask what was done last month and why it should move a number you care about. If the answer is a dashboard export and jargon, the margin on your account is going somewhere other than your rankings.

Third, you’re overpaying if the price never maps to your economics. A $3,000 retainer is cheap for a business where one customer is worth $50,000 and absurd for one where a sale is worth $40. Any provider who quotes before asking about your customer value is pricing their package, not your problem.

How to actually set your SEO budget

Work backward from customer value, not forward from a package price. Figure out what a new customer is worth, estimate how many customers organic search could realistically add per month and set a budget the math can justify. If five new customers a month wouldn’t pay for the retainer several times over, either the scope is wrong or the channel is.

Then commit for at least six months, because SEO compounds and the early months are mostly groundwork. Paying $2,500 a month for three months and quitting buys you nothing. Paying $1,500 for 12 consistent months often beats it.

And whatever you spend, insist on a written definition of success before the first invoice — qualified traffic, commercial rankings, leads or revenue influenced. The number on the proposal matters far less than whether anyone agreed on what it’s supposed to buy.

Every discovery call I run reaches the same two questions. The first is “will this work?” The second is “what should SEO cost?”

Founders ask the second one nervously, because they’ve usually collected three proposals that quote three wildly different numbers for what sounds like the same service. One says $700 a month. One says $3,500. One says $9,000. Nobody explains the gap.

I price SEO deals every week at my agency, and I’ve reviewed dozens of competitor proposals that prospects forward to me. So here’s the honest breakdown I give every founder who asks — including the parts that don’t flatter my industry.

LinkedIn knows it has an AI problem. 

Last month, the professional networking platform started giving users a way to flag posts and comments they believe were created by AI, using a “seems like AI slop” reporting button, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The move aims to slow the flood of AI-created content. 

LinkedIn isn’t alone. Most major social media platforms have tried to curb the rise of AI-generated posts, largely by relying on automated labels. It’s an approach with a spotty record, leaving some AI work unlabeled and mislabeling some human-created content as AI.

For example, social media star Nikolai Savic, who has five million followers on TikTok, is well-known for his creative cooking videos. He told the Journal last month that TikTok labeled some of his videos as AI-generated, even though he painstakingly edited them himself. The move caused him to lose credibility with fans. 

“People already have in their minds that I’m only using AI,” Savic said. “This hurt my reputation so much. And at TikTok, nobody really seems to care.”

The stakes may be higher for LinkedIn, which sells itself as a trusted place to find useful information, build professional relationships and uncover career opportunities for its more than one billion members. 

Many LinkedIn users turn to AI hoping it will help them communicate more clearly or post more often. Executives and industry observers caution that the result can be content that feels bland, overly polished or inauthentic.

AI as a new challenge

Brendan Gahan is the co-founder and CEO of Creator Authority, a LinkedIn influencer marketing agency. He told the Journal that “everybody uses AI to some degree.” However, he advises influencers to skip posting AI-generated content because it could damage their credibility. Success on the platform ultimately depends on credibility, he said. 

LinkedIn has encountered content problems before, like oversharing and scam job posts. “We have been working on this domain of low-quality content for a long time,” Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s vice president of product, told the Journal.

AI is testing the platform on a much larger scale. 

From April through June, 41% of LinkedIn’s long-form public posts and 30% of its public comments were entirely AI-generated, according to Pangram Labs, an AI-detection startup that analyzed nearly 57,000 pieces of content. The company found that LinkedIn had a higher concentration of AI-generated long posts than X, at 29%, and Reddit, at 13%.

Originality.ai, another AI-detection company, reached an even more striking conclusion. After reviewing 5,000 public LinkedIn posts in July, it determined that 81% showed more than a moderate amount of AI use. By comparison, just under half of the 5,500 public Reddit posts it reviewed met that same threshold.

LinkedIn disputed the research findings to the Journal, but did not share comparable results of its own. 

LinkedIn knows it has an AI problem. 

Last month, the professional networking platform started giving users a way to flag posts and comments they believe were created by AI, using a “seems like AI slop” reporting button, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The move aims to slow the flood of AI-created content. 

LinkedIn isn’t alone. Most major social media platforms have tried to curb the rise of AI-generated posts, largely by relying on automated labels. It’s an approach with a spotty record, leaving some AI work unlabeled and mislabeling some human-created content as AI.

Forty thousand dollars is a lot to wait on when you’re running a small restaurant. But that’s exactly what happened to Joy Kim, who spent eight months chasing down money Uber Eats owed her.

Kim, who owns Kyoto Teriyaki on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, had been waiting since November 2025 for the company to pay out nearly 1,500 orders, according to Fox 13 Seattle. She called support, sent emails, updated her bank information. Nothing worked.

It wasn’t until Fox 13 Seattle began inquiring about the missing funds that Uber Eats moved. Uber Eats said the delay came down to identity verification required to protect the merchant account, and that representatives made multiple attempts to reach Kim without success. The company said it completed video verification with her in late July and began processing the payment shortly after.

Despite the ordeal, Kim plans to keep using the platform. Local customers order through Uber Eats every day, she said, and cutting it off would mean losing a revenue stream she can’t afford to lose.

Forty thousand dollars is a lot to wait on when you’re running a small restaurant. But that’s exactly what happened to Joy Kim, who spent eight months chasing down money Uber Eats owed her.

Kim, who owns Kyoto Teriyaki on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, had been waiting since November 2025 for the company to pay out nearly 1,500 orders, according to Fox 13 Seattle. She called support, sent emails, updated her bank information. Nothing worked.

It wasn’t until Fox 13 Seattle began inquiring about the missing funds that Uber Eats moved. Uber Eats said the delay came down to identity verification required to protect the merchant account, and that representatives made multiple attempts to reach Kim without success. The company said it completed video verification with her in late July and began processing the payment shortly after.

Despite the ordeal, Kim plans to keep using the platform. Local customers order through Uber Eats every day, she said, and cutting it off would mean losing a revenue stream she can’t afford to lose.

It may be stalled growth, a customer segment that is not converting or a team issue that keeps resurfacing.

Every business owner has a problem they know they need to address.

To really solve the problem, business owners need dedicated time to focus, honest feedback from people who understand the stakes and a structured way to turn a broad source of frustration into a decision and a plan.

That’s why we teamed up with Robert Irvine — the celebrity chef who has helped hundreds of struggling business owners on his show “Restaurant: Impossible” — to put together Overcoming Impossible Live, a one-day Entrepreneur Level Up event taking place on October 23, 2026, at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge in New York City.

This is not a traditional business conference built around back-to-back keynote presentations. It is a working session for founders and business owners like you who are ready to confront the specific issue holding their company back — and solve it.

Solve Your Biggest Business Challenge

At Overcoming Impossible Live, attendees will identify the “impossible” issue holding their business back, then work through it in structured small groups alongside founders facing similar business problems.

This is not a generic networking exercise. The goal is to put entrepreneurs in a room with peers who understand the same kind of pressure, whether that is a growth problem, leadership challenge, operational issue or difficult strategic choice.

Robert Irvine and Entrepreneur Editor in Chief Jason Feifer will coach attendees through the workshop experience. The goal is to help you leave with:

• Clarity on the problem you need to solve
• Feedback from founders facing comparable business challenges
• A concrete action plan for when you return to work

Hear Real Business Lessons

The afternoon will bring together three entrepreneurs who have built, rebuilt and made difficult decisions at scale.

Robert Irvine will be joined by Gary Vaynerchuk and Megan Thee Stallion, who will each share an honest story about a moment when they were stuck—what happened, what it cost and the steps they took to help them move forward.

Gary Vaynerchuk will deliver his “State of the Union on Attention,” while Megan Thee Stallion will share lessons on overcoming the odds and owning difficult decisions.

Ask the Questions That Matter

Overcoming Impossible Live also creates space for entrepreneurs to ask direct questions about their own businesses.

That distinction matters. The value this exclusive event provides is to use the room to pressure-test your own situation, hear candid perspectives and leave better equipped to act.

If there is a problem you have been working around instead of working on, this is the day to put it all on the table.

Register for Overcoming Impossible Live

It may be stalled growth, a customer segment that is not converting or a team issue that keeps resurfacing.

Every business owner has a problem they know they need to address.

To really solve the problem, business owners need dedicated time to focus, honest feedback from people who understand the stakes and a structured way to turn a broad source of frustration into a decision and a plan.

Founders are often taught to move quickly, listen to feedback and keep improving. That advice is useful, but it can also create a trap. When a product or business model starts to struggle, many entrepreneurs immediately look for ways to refine the solution. They add a feature. They adjust the messaging. They change the packaging, pricing or sales process.

Sometimes that works. Other times it only makes the business more complicated. I have learned that one of the most important questions a founder can ask is not “How do we make this better?” It is “Are we still solving the right problem?”

That question matters because markets do not stand still. Economic pressure changes buying behavior. What felt urgent to customers at one stage of the business may feel less relevant six months later. A product that once solved a clear need can slowly drift away from the problem it was created to address.

This is especially important for founders building in health, wellness, consumer products or any category where trust, behavior and daily routines matter. Customers may not always be able to explain what they need in a survey or review. But they will show it through what they buy, repeat, abandon and recommend.

Research from McKinsey has found that organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin. For founders, the takeaway is simple: strategy should not be built only around what customers say. It should also be built around what they do.

Reassess the problem before refining the solution

Founders can become attached to their original idea because they remember the energy that gave rise to it. They remember the pain point, the early conversations and the first signs of traction. But early validation is not permanent validation.

The more a company grows, the more dangerous assumptions become. A founder may think the problem is still convenience, when the customer now cares more about trust. They may think the challenge is price, when the real barrier is confusion. They may think the market wants more options, when customers are actually asking for a clearer path.

Before refining a product, founders should pause and define the current problem as clearly as possible. What is the customer trying to solve today? What has changed in the market? What pressure is the customer feeling now that they were not feeling before?

In my own work across consumer and wellness brands, this reassessment has been essential. A product may begin with one promise, but the customer’s relationship with that product can reveal something deeper. They may not only want a supplement, a skincare product or a wellness solution. They may want simplicity, confidence, consistency or a better way to make daily choices that support their lives.

When my team understands that deeper problem, improvement becomes more focused. The goal is no longer to add more. It is to solve more precisely.

Let behavior lead your strategy

Customer feedback matters, but it is not the whole story. Customers can tell you what they think they want. Their behavior tells you what they truly value.

That is why founders should pay close attention to purchasing patterns, repeat usage, drop-off points, engagement signals and the moments when customers hesitate. These signals reveal where your business is aligned and where it is creating friction.

If customers consistently purchase one product but ignore a bundle, the issue may not be awareness — the bundle may be too confusing. If customers engage heavily with educational content but hesitate to buy, the product may need clearer proof or simpler positioning. If customers buy once but do not return, the problem may be experience, expectation or follow-through.

I have learned to separate preference from behavior. A customer may say they want more choices, but too many choices can create decision fatigue. A customer may say they want innovation, but what they actually reward is reliability. A customer may praise a brand’s mission, but only buy when the offer feels clear and useful.

Real-world action is one of the most honest forms of feedback. The founder’s job is to notice it without defensiveness.

Simplify before you scale

When growth slows, many companies respond by adding. They add more products, more features, more campaigns and more explanations. The intention is usually good. The result is often confusion.

Complexity can make a business feel more sophisticated internally while making it harder for customers to understand externally. In their influential Harvard Business Review study on “feature fatigue,” Roland Rust and colleagues found that consumers routinely pick feature-rich products at the moment of purchase, then abandon them once they discover the complexity gets in the way of actually using them. The lesson for founders is unambiguous: more is not the same as better.

Founders should ask hard questions before scaling. Is the offer clear enough to grow? Can people quickly understand what the product does? Can they see who it is for? Can they explain the value in their own words? Can they buy, use and recommend it without needing excessive explanation? Answering those questions requires looking at the entire customer journey.

Simplicity does not mean reducing ambition. It means removing anything that distracts from the core value. In many cases, scaling becomes easier when the offer is narrower, the message is cleaner and the experience is more intuitive.

Build reassessment into the business

Product-market fit is not a finish line. It is a relationship between the company, the customer and the market — and like any relationship, it requires continued attention.

Founders should create systems that make reassessment part of the business rhythm. That may include regular reviews of customer behavior, cross-functional conversations between product and marketing teams, post-purchase analysis, customer service insights and market trend reviews.

The key is not to collect more data for its own sake. The key is to turn feedback into decisions. What should be simplified? What should be removed? What should be tested? What needs to be explained differently? What assumption is no longer true?

This process also requires humility. Founders must be willing to admit that a product can be good and still need to change. A strategy can be smart and still need to evolve. A market can validate an idea once and still demand something different later.

The founders who build lasting companies are not only the ones who move fast. They are the ones who stay close enough to the customer to know when to pause, reassess and redirect.

Growth is not always about building the next version of the solution. Sometimes it is about returning to the problem with fresh eyes. When founders make that a habit, they give their companies a better chance to stay relevant, useful and resilient as the market changes.

Founders are often taught to move quickly, listen to feedback and keep improving. That advice is useful, but it can also create a trap. When a product or business model starts to struggle, many entrepreneurs immediately look for ways to refine the solution. They add a feature. They adjust the messaging. They change the packaging, pricing or sales process.

Sometimes that works. Other times it only makes the business more complicated. I have learned that one of the most important questions a founder can ask is not “How do we make this better?” It is “Are we still solving the right problem?”

That question matters because markets do not stand still. Economic pressure changes buying behavior. What felt urgent to customers at one stage of the business may feel less relevant six months later. A product that once solved a clear need can slowly drift away from the problem it was created to address.

Most people assume successful businesses start with a detailed plan or a big idea. In my case, both companies I founded began with little more than a willingness to act.

Years spent helping companies grow through strategy, content and customer acquisition taught me a lot, but eventually I hit a ceiling. My first business had run its course. The real value was in what it revealed: bigger opportunities waiting beyond my current work. So I sold my company and started over.

The path forward was anything but linear. Mistakes, hard lessons, international travel and personal investment shaped every phase. Each decision, good or bad, pushed me closer to launching a biodegradable startup.

During the Covid years, I spent nearly four years in Uttarakhand working closely with farmers and rural communities across different regions. Working alongside farmers gave me a ground-level view of challenges and surfaced opportunities that rarely show up in market reports.

Transitioning from idea to reality, I realized building a sustainable business is a different game from launching a conventional startup. Timelines stretch, challenges multiply, and results take longer to materialize. But when progress comes, it tends to last. Each phase surfaced lessons that still shape how I approach decisions today.

1. Spend time in the field

One of my biggest lessons came from working in the hemp industry. It looked easy to source hemp because it was widely available. But in practice, scaling up was much more complicated.

There were regulatory hurdles, unclear land titles and tough terrain that made operations difficult. I wouldn’t have known about these problems from reports or research alone. I learned about them by living and working in those areas.

This experience showed me that opportunities are rarely limited by demand. Instead, they are often held back by challenges you only see when you’re actually there. If you want to build something that lasts, spend time where the problems are real. Firsthand exposure reveals challenges and opportunities that rarely show up from a distance.

2. Be ready to change direction

One of the hardest decisions I made was selling my first business. Entrepreneurs hear a lot about persistence, but self-awareness matters just as much. Sometimes the right move is to step back and ask whether your current path still aligns with your long-term goals.

For me, the business served its purpose. It gave me experience, industry knowledge, relationships and a better understanding of sustainability.

3. Think global, act local

As I continued exploring opportunities in sustainability, I traveled to China and Australia to better understand how other markets were approaching innovation, manufacturing and the environment. Travel forced me to rethink how I approached challenges and opportunities. That shift in perspective is often what drives sustainable growth.

In China, I saw how industries can scale rapidly when infrastructure, manufacturing capabilities and market demand align. In Australia, I saw a strong emphasis on sustainability and long-term environmental thinking.

Opportunities often appear in one market years before they show up in others. Most founders focus on local competition, but the real edge comes from spotting global trends before they hit your own market.

Travel doesn’t always give you answers, but it does give you perspective. And having perspective helps you make better decisions.

4. Build credibility before visibility

People often ask me how I managed to grow my business without spending money on ads. The answer is simple: I focused on building credibility before trying to get noticed.

It’s tempting to think growth only comes from bigger marketing budgets. Advertising can buy attention but not trust. Focus on building relationships, understanding the industry, educating stakeholders and creating genuine value.

While founding Ukhi, the materials science deep tech startup I started, I focused on building genuine content authority through original research studies and high-quality blog posts, all intended to help our customers. Now, this strategy is paying off.

This approach took patience. Building credibility is slow, but the payoff lasts longer than any quick win from advertising.

Business growth came slower, but it stuck. People engaged because they trusted us. We did not run ad campaigns at all. And increased trust led to referrals, partnerships and opportunities that money rarely buys.

Credibility compounds

One of the most valuable lessons I learned is that credibility compounds. Advertising stops when the budget runs out, but trust keeps working long after. Look at successful businesses; they often focus on outcomes. They see growth, funding, partnerships or market traction.

What rarely gets noticed are the years spent learning, making mistakes and investing before results show up.

Those early stages are what make sustainable success possible. For me, it evolved through years of working with farmers, expanded through international exposure and continues today through new ventures and ongoing investment in sustainability.

If there’s one lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s that clarity almost never comes before action. Most of the opportunities that shaped my career only showed up after I took the first step.

The path was rarely clear or easy, but every lesson and mistake helped me better understand my impact. That, more than any business plan, is what helped me build a sustainable business from nothing.

Most people assume successful businesses start with a detailed plan or a big idea. In my case, both companies I founded began with little more than a willingness to act.

Years spent helping companies grow through strategy, content and customer acquisition taught me a lot, but eventually I hit a ceiling. My first business had run its course. The real value was in what it revealed: bigger opportunities waiting beyond my current work. So I sold my company and started over.

The path forward was anything but linear. Mistakes, hard lessons, international travel and personal investment shaped every phase. Each decision, good or bad, pushed me closer to launching a biodegradable startup.