The two-year pause that rewired how I build

What I actually did

After selling Coconut Bowls, I had time. No pressure to jump into the next business, and enough income from some light consulting to keep things ticking over. So I didn't rush.

My next brand, ARTSN, was already ready to go. The concept was locked, the products were in a warehouse. But they sat there, dormant, for about 12 months while I, to be honest, went deep into AI.

What I actually did during that time was go deep into health, biotech, and longevity. I built a private lab testing funnel. The idea was simple: in Australia, if you want a blood test, you go to a doctor, get a referral, give blood, and wait for the doctor to explain the results. A few companies have started letting people buy referrals online and get the results sent directly to themselves, which is going wild in the US but is still a 1-2% behaviour in Australia. I thought there was a real opportunity to capture it with better marketing, branding, and AI-driven software.

Where it broke

The model relied on me being a middleman between customers and existing medical companies. In healthcare, that's a dangerous place to sit.

To do it properly, I would have needed to hire a medical professional, invest heavily in compliance, and build legal infrastructure. Compliance was non-negotiable, and without practitioner privilege as a non-medical person, I was exposed to real risk around fines and patient privacy if anything went wrong.

So I didn't push it further. The audience is still there. The data is still there. It's real optionality I can come back to. I proved the model worked, but I realised that at this stage of my life, I wasn't the best person to pursue it.

What I was actually doing without realising it

At the time, it felt like I was messing around.

Looking back, I was doing something much more valuable. I was learning how to build leverage.

That's the difference most people miss. Not just using AI tools, but connecting APIs, automating workflows, chaining tasks together into systems.

The biggest shift wasn't ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. It was moving beyond the chat interface and into systems. That's when everything changed.

What I consumed during that time

I listened to the All In podcast and My First Million every week. I paid close attention to people like Greg Isenberg who post about emerging AI tools. I spent a lot of time on X, subscribed to the newsletters that were catching the frontier of what AI could do.

What I believed before that I no longer do

That's a completely different model. And we're in a golden era for one-person businesses to reach heights that used to require entire teams. There's serious talk of one-person billion-dollar businesses becoming reality within a few years, and I absolutely believe it's possible.

What would have sounded crazy to me in 2023

Two things.

Web development is the clearest example. Something that used to take weeks of back-and-forth with developers, thousands of dollars in contractor fees, now takes me one to two hours working with an AI tool. And the output is better, because the brief is whatever I type, and I iterate in real time instead of waiting days for revisions.

Same with images. Same with video. Same with copy. The gap between idea and execution has collapsed.

How this changed how I build

No lag. No dependency on anyone else's schedule or availability.

The part most people don't talk about

I used to believe there was a real trade-off between ambition and life. If I wanted to build something big, I had to sacrifice time with family, hobbies, health, the stuff that actually matters.

I don't believe that anymore.

You can build something meaningful, make great money, and still be present. Not because the work is easier, it isn't, but because the leverage is higher, the friction is lower, and the control sits with you.

The ability to have it all is genuinely possible now, if you're in control. And the people in control are the self-employed, the entrepreneurs, the people creating things.

The part I'm cautious about

This isn't all upside, and I want to be honest about that.

The people most at risk aren't founders. They're employees. I've written a separate piece directly for them.

If you're an employee reading this, I'd really encourage you to spend some time exploring what AI can do for your current role. Not because your job is going away tomorrow, but because the gap between AI-enabled workers and everyone else is going to widen fast.

What triggered the “no employees” thesis

It wasn't a single moment. It was my operating rhythm.

I realised my current business can generate tens of thousands of dollars a day or a week, and my time isn't the constraint. Execution isn't the constraint.

Advice for anyone who just exited

Don't rush into the next thing. That pressure is real, and it's dangerous.

Picking the wrong path isn't neutral. It compounds in the wrong direction. You can lose years. And more importantly, you can miss the right opportunity entirely because you committed to the wrong one too quickly.

Because at this stage, you don't need another business. You need the right one. And the only way to find that is to give yourself enough space to figure out how the game has actually changed.