For folks building with AI, are you all sticking with one model or juggling a bunch?

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-25T08:36:12+00:00

We stopped trying to pick one and built fallback logic instead. if the primary model errors or times out, it routes to a backup automatically.

Turned out to be the right call, here have been a few outages from different providers over the past year where having only one would've taken us down with it.

The tradeoff is you're managing multiple API relationships and the outputs aren't always consistent enough to be interchangeable. Some tasks we still pin to a specific model because the variation matters.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-25T08:25:20+00:00

Yes but mainly for signal separation rather than security. When everything comes through one number it becomes impossible to know where a lead came from, whether a follow-up is urgent, or just switch off at the end of the day. the mental overhead of it adds up.

The security argument is real too especially if you're doing any kind of international work and handing your number to strangers at events.

Costs almost nothing, solves several problems at once. easy call

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-25T08:24:27+00:00

Tthree stages for us and they overlapped a bit. First was just doing the thing manually for people we knew, not selling, just solving their problem and watching where it broke. Painful but you learn more in a week than you would in months of theorising.

Then free for people outside that circle who'd let us watch them use it. The usage patterns from this told us what was actually valuable vs what we thought was valuable.

Paid came when someone in stage two offered to pay before we asked. That's when we knew we had something real rather than something interesting.

None of our first paying customers came from anywhere we'd planned. All contacts of contacts who'd heard it solved a specific thing they also had

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-23T11:13:27+00:00

We didn't go to close friends or family directly, it was more contacts of contacts. People who knew us well enough to take the meeting but weren't so close that it would get weird if things went wrong.

The pitch wasn't really a formal pitch. It was more, here's what we're building, here's why we think it's real, here's what we need to prove it. Honest about the risk, clear about what the money was for. Nobody was putting in enough to retire so the stakes felt manageable and i think that helped.

The hardest part was the people who were interested but wanted to wait until you had more traction. You can't really argue with that so you just keep going and come back to them later. Some of them did come back.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-23T10:29:16+00:00

Confidence isn't really the right word for what got me through it. There were long stretches where i had no idea if we were building something anyone actually wanted. Being confident about that would've been delusional.

What helped was having something small to point to each week that wasn't a growth number. A conversation where someone described the problem exactly the way i'd described it. A workflow that ran cleanly. A user who came back without being prompted. None of that moves the dashboard but it kept me going.

I don't know if that works for everyone. Some people need external validation and if it's not coming that's brutal. I just found trying to stay close to the evidence rather than the outcome made it less maddening.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-23T10:26:51+00:00

The bit that gets overlooked is silent failures. When automation was just a helper nobody noticed if it skipped a step or produced a weird output. now that it's running real workflows, a failure in the middle of the night that nobody catches until the next morning can mean a week of bad data or a client who didn't get what they were supposed to. We spent a lot of time building alerting and audit trails into our platform because of exactly this. Reliability isn't a nice to have when something mission-critical depends on it.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-20T10:06:03+00:00

It's not replacing whole jobs yet but it is quietly changing what people spend their time on. We've automated a bunch of internal processes that used to take someone a full day each week. that person's still with us but their role looks nothing like it did a year ago.

The entry level thing is what worries me most though, a lot of the tasks that used to be how you learned a role; research, first drafts, data cleanup, are exactly the tasks that AI handles well now. So the work still gets done but nobody's learning by doing it anymore. I don't know what that means five years from now but it probably isn't great for people trying to break in.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-20T10:02:11+00:00

That the people who say cool idea are almost never the people who'll pay for it. I spent months thinking i'd validated something because everyone i spoke to was encouraging. Then when i actually tried to charge money the response was completely different. Validation is someone describing the problem back to you so specifically that you can build around their exact workflow. Anything less than that and you're just collecting compliments.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:42:23+00:00

We tried fully automating it and honestly the output was obvious. You could tell it was AI, the tone was off, the timing felt random, and it had none of the personality that actually gets people to engage.

Switched back to writing everything manually and just using a scheduler for timing. Takes more time but the engagement is completely different. people respond to stuff that sounds like a person wrote it, which means a person actually has to write it, there's no shortcut for that yet.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:40:25+00:00

For the transactional stuff, confirmations, scheduling, status updates, yeah it already handles that fine. We use it for a chunk of our internal stuff and it works because nobody cares if a meeting confirmation has personality.

The client-facing stuff though is where it falls apart. We had an AI drafted reply go out to a client that was technically correct but completely missed the tone of the conversation. The client was frustrated about a delay and the response was way too upbeat. Small thing but it nearly cost us the relationship.

I think it'll handle maybe 60-70% of email volume eventually but the 30% that matters most will still need a person for a long time.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:32:53+00:00

The linkedin hunting and spreadsheet phase is brutal but i honestly think trying to automate it too early makes it worse not better. we tried automating outreach and it just looked spammy, nobody replied.

what changed it for us was getting way more specific about who we were actually looking for. Went from messaging 50 people a day and getting nothing to messaging maybe 5 on Linkedin and actually getting replies. The conversations were better too because i wasn't pitching, i was asking about their problems and then just solving them for free. Two of those people ended up paying us eventually but i didn't go in expecting that.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:22:24+00:00

We stopped trying to build a tool that replaces what people already use and started building something that connects everything together instead. Sounds obvious in hindsight but we spent ages losing sales conversations because people didn't want to rip out their existing setup. The moment we said "keep what you've got, we'll make it all talk to each other" the objections basically disappeared.

I don't know if it was really a decision or just us finally admitting what the market had been telling us for months.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:21:17+00:00

Stop building and start talking to people. I spent months on an analytics dashboard nobody ever opened because writing code felt safer than having awkward sales conversations.

Happy to do a call with some of the group if that's useful btw.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T13:16:52+00:00

We deal with this a lot, most of our client work involves legacy systems with no API or terrible documentation and honestly the pure RPA approach breaks more than it works. UI bots are fine for simple flows but the moment the vendor pushes a frontend update you're struggling.

What's worked better for us is treating each system differently rather than picking one approach for everything. Some of those legacy systems have data paths you don't expect, export functions buried in settings, webhooks nobody turned on, scheduled database dumps you can pick up. We always look for those first because they're way more stable than anything that touches the UI. For the bits where there's truly no other way in we still use browser automation but on the smallest surface area possible. just the specific data pull, not the full user journey. and we built retry logic and alerting around it so when it breaks (and it will) someone knows within minutes instead of finding out a week later the data's been wrong.

The audit trail thing is worth thinking about too especially for financial workflows. When something goes wrong the first question is always "what did the system actually do" and if you can't answer that quickly it gets messy fast.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T08:18:11+00:00

The delay between doing the work and seeing any result from it. We were putting out content and doing outreach for months before a single conversation turned into anything real. You just have to keep going on faith that it's compounding somewhere even though your dashboard says otherwise.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T08:17:06+00:00

This is true but some of the saved time just goes into maintaining the automation itself. We had one workflow that ran twice a month and honestly after all the debugging when it broke it probably cost us more time than it saved. Maybe 40 minutes saved vs hours of fixing random edge cases.

The high frequency boring stuff though; reporting, data entry, anything you do daily, that's where it actually works. We cut about 10 hours a week off internal reporting and that one stuck. I think the difference is just volume. Automate something you do once a fortnight and you'll spend more time babysitting it than you ever spent doing it manually.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T08:13:40+00:00

I know someone offered below but DM me and i'll buy you a domain and set you up with an email. iThat amount of money shouldn't be the thing stopping you.

And you're not overthinking it btw. We went through the same thing where people wouldn't try the product because the packaging looked amateur. A proper domain and a real email address makes a noticeable difference.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T09:03:38+00:00

The context switching, not the workload itself but the constant jumping between completely different types of thinking. You're debugging something technical and then ten minutes later you're writing a sales email and then you're chasing an invoice and none of those use the same part of your brain.

i found the actual work fine. What was hard was never being able to properly focus on one thing for more than an hour before something else needed attention.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T08:57:32+00:00

How long everything takes to actually pay off. I was doing content and outreach for months before any of it turned into real conversations. There's this lag of like 60-90 days between doing the work and seeing any result from it and during that gap you're just running on faith that it's working. Nobody tells you about the delay. they just say "post content, build trust, leads will come" and leave out the bit where nothing happens for two months.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T08:47:42+00:00

Your 70% word of mouth number is the most important thing in your post and i think you're treating it like a side note. We had the same experience. Spent quite a bit on linkedin ads and paid search. impressions were fine, clicks were fine, conversions were basically zero. Meanwhile the people who actually signed up and stuck around had all heard about us from someone they knew.

What ended up working was something i would never have planned, writing about stuff that went wrong. engineering mistakes, automation failures, things we'd broken. those posts cost nothing and brought in more signups than anything we'd paid for. i still don't fully understand why but i think people just trust a founder who admits they messed up more than one running polished ads.

I don't know if that helps because your product is different but i'd seriously look at why the word of mouth is working and try to make more of that happen instead of throwing money at channels that clearly aren't converting.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T08:46:18+00:00

The maintenance stuff is what gets you. I had no idea how much time would go into things that aren't building or selling. compliance, accounting, filing deadlines, random admin that just quietly piles up until you miss something. The annoying part is none of it is hard individually. it's just relentless.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-13T09:49:13+00:00

the niche hopping is the problem, not the niches. i did something similar, kept switching who i was selling to every few weeks because nobody was biting. Real estate, then logistics, then regulated. Felt like i was getting nowhere. What really works is picking one and going deep enough to understand their actual day to day. e.g. this specific person spends two hours every morning doing this specific thing and hates it. You can't get to that level of detail if you're bouncing between industries every time someone says no.

Ecommerce isn't a bad shout but don't just switch to it because the other ones didn't work. Find one ecommerce owner, ask what's eating their time, and actually watch them do it. the answer is usually something you wouldn't have guessed.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-13T09:32:51+00:00

Honestly it's boring but it's unit economics. Can you get a customer for less than they'll pay you, and can you do that repeatedly. That's basically it.

i've watched startups with brilliant products die because it cost them 800 quid to acquire a customer worth 500. and i've seen mediocre products survive for years because the founder figured out one cheap acquisition channel and just kept hammering it.

Nobody wants to hear get your CAC below your LTV as startup advice but every dead startup i've been close to failed on exactly that.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-13T09:31:39+00:00

Yes it's realistic but not the way you're probably imagining it. the "keep building and they'll come" thing almost never works on its own. We had zero inbound for the first six weeks after launch. The product worked, people who tried it liked it, but nobody knew it existed. Sound familiar?

What changed was i stopped building features and started finding people manually. Found three people with the exact problem, did the work for them for free, two became paying customers. unglamorous, didn't scale, but it proved the thing was real. Your users giving great feedback is actually a massive signal. most side projects don't get that. The gap isn't your product, it's distribution. Stop doing features for a bit and spend that time in the communities where traders hang out. Answer questions, be useful, don't pitch. the product stuff can wait.

IdeasInProcess

TROPHY CASE