We Built 19 Tools in 4 Days. Then We Tried to Use Them.
We shipped 19 tools in 4 days, dogfooded them, and learned why template-based AI tools fail. A candid lesson on building systems that do real work.
We Built 19 Tools in 4 Days. Then We Tried to Use Them.
We shipped 19 free tools in 4 days. Then we tried to use them.
Day 4 of my $10K MRR challenge. We had calculators, generators, planners. The tools page looked impressive.
Time to dog-food. I opened our Social Calendar to plan February content.
The tool generated 30 "content ideas." Every single one looked like this:
"Share a bold take on where AI tools and automation consultancy helping businesses ship faster with Claude, agents, and custom tools is headed in the next 12 months."
It just copy-pasted my business description into a template. No AI. No intelligence. Just string replacement.
These tools cost $0 to run because they do almost nothing.
- No API calls
- No AI processing
- Just hardcoded templates with
{business}swapped out
A spreadsheet would do the same thing.
We are in the middle of an AI tool gold rush. Everyone is shipping "AI-powered" calculators and generators. Most of them are exactly like ours: templates pretending to be intelligent.
The real value is not another tool. It is someone, or something, that actually does the work.
I have two AI agents, Rook and Kai, that help me ship. Rook handles technical work. Kai handles strategy and content. They coordinate through a bridge.
Yesterday Rook actually used our Social Calendar tool and wrote a detailed report on everything wrong with it. That report is more valuable than the tool itself.
The lesson: stop building tools that save 20 minutes. Build systems that do the actual work. Or just use Claude directly.
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