I lost about four weeks doing this wrong.
Not because I'm slow. Because every piece of advice I followed came from somebody who doesn't run a business and has never had a payroll to make.
Here's what I'd tell you if you called me tonight.
The 5 pieces of advice that wasted my first month
"Learn prompt engineering first." No. Open it and do a real job from your actual business. You'll learn more in one hour of that than a week of theory. Prompt engineering is a thing people made up so they'd have something to sell you.
"You need 10 different tools." You need one. I had six subscriptions before I had a single result worth anything. Every one of them was me avoiding the actual work by shopping instead.
"Watch tutorials until you understand it." You don't understand it by watching. Nobody does. You understand it by doing something badly and then doing it again.
"Start with something simple." Wrong. Start with something you hate doing. Because you'll actually finish it. Simple things you don't care about is how you end up quitting in week two, and I'll get to that.
"Don't trust it with anything important." Then what exactly are you using it for? Trust it AND check it. That's the whole job.
Rest of it's yours
Drop your email and the whole thing opens up right here. No waiting on a confirmation, no download, nothing to install.
You'll also get the new ones as I make them. Leave whenever, no hard feelings.
Week 1: Do one real job
Not a practice job. A real one, from your actual business, that you were going to have to do anyway.
Pick the thing you've been putting off. The thing that makes your stomach tighten a little when you think about it. The pile of receipts, the follow-up you owe eleven people, the spreadsheet you keep meaning to make sense of.
Do that one.
Two hours a night, after everyone's asleep. That's plenty. This isn't a bootcamp.
And breathe… you can't screw any of this up. You're typing in a box. Nothing you do talks to your bank, your customers, or your files unless you go out of your way to connect it. Stop being afraid of the shit you have complete control over.
By Friday you'll have done one real thing. That's the entire goal for week one. Not mastery. One thing.
Week 2: Set it up so it knows you
Now that you've used it a bit, spend fifteen minutes telling it about your business. Who you are, what you sell, who buys it, how you talk.
This is the step everybody skips and it's the difference between a chatbot and something that's actually useful.
Same question, completely different answer, because it stopped guessing at your world.
Week 3: The wall
This is where you're going to quit, so let me get ahead of it.
There was a night about three weeks in where I sat at my kitchen table at midnight and genuinely thought: I am too old and too dumb for this.
Nothing worked. I'd been at it four hours. Errors I didn't understand about things I couldn't name. And the whole time there's a voice going, every twenty-two year old on the internet is doing this in their sleep.
Here's what actually got me through, and it's not inspirational.
I stopped trying to understand it.
I just described what I wanted in plain English, over and over, like I was explaining it to somebody who'd never seen my business. When it got it wrong I said "no, that's wrong, here's what I actually meant" and said it again.
That was the whole unlock. I stopped trying to speak its language and made it speak mine.
If you're in week three right now… that's the wall. It's normal. Everybody hits it. Almost every single person who tells me this stuff is overhyped quit somewhere right around day ten to twenty.
They were one week away.
Week 4: Make it a habit, not a project
Pick two things you now do with it every single week. Just two.
Maybe it's your follow-up messages every Monday. Maybe it's turning your voice notes into something readable. Maybe it's the quotes.
Two things, every week, without thinking about it. That's what "using AI" actually looks like. It's not a transformation. It's two boring tasks that stopped eating your evening.
The 7 mistakes that make it feel useless
I made every one of these.
- Asking instead of assigning. It's an employee, not a search bar. "Write me a follow-up email to this customer, here's the context" beats "how do I write good emails."
- Never telling it about your business. It doesn't know you. It never will unless you say so.
- New chat every time. You re-explain yourself forever and never build anything.
- Taking the first answer. Say "shorter, more direct, give me 3 versions." The second one is always better and it costs you four words.
- Using it for stuff you don't care about. So you never once see it do something that impresses you.
- Never uploading a file. This is the big one. It is roughly ten times more useful when it can SEE your documents instead of you describing them.
- Quitting in week two. Which is right before it clicks.
If you're starting broke
Twenty dollars and thirty nights. That's the whole plan.
Week 1. Pay for one tool. That's your twenty bucks. Learn it two hours a night after the house goes quiet.
Week 2. Pick ONE thing local businesses are bad at. Missed calls. Everybody's bad at missed calls.
Week 3. Build it for free for one business you know. Free, on purpose. You're buying proof, not money.
Week 4. Take that result to ten more businesses of the same type.
No course. No funnel. No personal brand. One skill, one piece of proof, ten conversations.
I'm not promising you a number, because I don't know your market or how hard you'll actually work. But that costs twenty bucks and a month of nights, and I'd take it over almost anything else you could do starting from nothing.
The only thing that actually matters
You will not get this from watching. You'll get it from doing one real thing badly, then doing it again.
Everybody who told me it was overhyped had used it for about nine days.
Don't be that. Give it a month.
The more you do with it, the easier it gets. That part's just true.
— Jordan