To Everyone Who Made Year One Possible (And What We're Building Next)

There's a moment every first-time founder can relate to.

It's 3 AM. You're staring at a broken <div> on the landing page you built too fast. Impending doom. Self-doubt. Wondering if anyone will ever click "Contact Us."

And then someone does.

The Believers

I need to start with gratitude. Without the people who believed early, there's no story to tell.

To the 11 paying clients who trusted AI Experts with their AI transformation in 2025: thank you. You looked at my one-person operation, my vibe-coded website, my AI-written proposals - and said, "Yeah, I trust you with my business."

You believed before the testimonials existed. You referred colleagues before we wrote the case studies. You gave feedback that made everything better.

To the mentors who had no obligation to help: founders who'd been through the crucible, execs who saw potential where I saw panic. I learned more from you in 9 months than in ten years of corporate.

To family and friends who watched me work nearly every Saturday of 2025 and didn't stage an intervention: I appreciate your restraint. To the few who joined me in cafes on Saturdays to grind - thank you for making this first year collaborative.

To the foundation model labs: The army I needed fits conveniently in a browser tab. Thanks for building AI which passed the Math Olympiad, wrote production-quality code, and drafted all my SOWs. And for taking on a workload that would've taken human teams weeks.

What AI Experts Built With Your Trust

Superhumans: training that transforms how organizations work with AI. Not death-by-PowerPoint corporate sessions. Real capability shifts. Executives who arrived anxious left fluent. Teams now automate the mundane and amplify the creative.

SuperTools: custom AI agents and applications that actually work and that simplify complex workflows. RAG systems (live docs as memory) for knowledge retrieval. Multi-agent applications for Sales, Marketing, and Growth. Research agents that populate CRMs automatically - eliminating hours of manual work.

The numbers:

• Trained tens of C-suite executives, met countless more
• Trained 1000+ team members from 3 conference stages and 30+ Zoom seminars in industries as diverse as tech, PE, banking, real estate, and law.
• Total lines of code written (personally, with AI): 3,926,527
• Total github commits (personally): 622
• Total coffees consumed (regrettably, also personally): 1095

The common thread: AI Experts didn't just talk about AI. We implemented it. In messy, real-world environments with legacy systems, enterprise software, and skeptical stakeholders.

What I Learned About Myself

You can build something from nothing - but you can't scale it alone. Time to grow.

Rest isn't laziness. I worked nearly every Saturday of 2025. But I protected every Sunday. Following an ancient tradition of Sabbath: no emails, no work. Six days of maximum effort followed by one day of complete nothing made every week dramatically better. Problems that seemed impossible on Saturday afternoon had solutions by Monday morning.

Charging what you're worth is a skill, not a switch. I got better at it. Still practicing.

Uncertainty and momentum can coexist. Some days felt like controlled chaos. Most days, actually. That's apparently normal.

A Year of Firsts

• First time getting paid to speak. Conferences and corporate stages. I'd done plenty at Deloitte, but Deloitte always footed the bill. This time, a willing committee or client leadership signed the check. Different feeling entirely.
• First time business traveling on my own dime in nearly five years as a consultant. I picked the cheapest hotel and skipped the room service.
• First LLC filing, business bank account, SOW written, invoice sent, employee hired, etc. etc.

Even without meeting the corporate salary or keeping NYC rent paid, the year would've been worth doing for these lessons alone. But the vision was never merely to "learn entrepreneurship."

The vision: build a proper company - and a damn good one. A community of happy customers in the fastest-growing industry in the world. A collaborative, creative team hyper-fixated on client problems.

What We're Building in 2026

The next milestone requires a team.

We're hiring:

• AI Purists who also know client-service
• Marketing to amplify what's working
• Operations to systematize delivery
• Software Engineers to build faster and smarter

Most roles are ad hoc right now - that means if you’re talented with AI, want a taste of startups, but can’t commit full-time, AI Experts might be perfect for you.

We're partnering. If you or someone you know wants to collaborate on transformational AI training or custom automation development, reach out.

We're scaling impact. More organizations implementing AI instead of just talking about it. More executive teams transforming from anxious to fluent. More systems that actually drive ROI.

AI Experts starts 2026 with clarity: we're building a category-defining agentic services organization. And we're just getting started.

The Bigger Vision

An analogy I keep coming back to: imagine it's 1972 and you start a business teaching people about records and music. You install record players and show folks how to make their own records. But all your efforts are driving customers to buy albums at someone else's store - say “Virgin Records”, founded by Richard Branson, for example. 

You're supporting Virgin's sales. You're not building Virgin.

That's what most AI consultancies are doing right now. Training people on OpenAI's tools. Building agents on top of other platforms. Implementing Microsoft or Google's products. Valuable, sure. But you don't own the distribution. You don't own the community. 

The long game: become the platform. The place where AI products want to list. Where AI builders want their name. Where people come to learn, connect, and level up.

We're starting with training and tools because that's where the pain is sharpest. But the vision is bigger.

The audacious goal: give 1,000,000 humans the opportunity to adapt and thrive in the age of AGI. 

Not "reach" a million people. Actually help them - with expert training, tools, and community that makes a material difference in how they work. To make their work more creative than ever before.

We're not there yet. But that's the direction. Automation will help us get there.

The Ask

If you've read this far, thank you. You're either very patient, very interested, or avoiding something you should be doing. (No judgment. I wrote most of this while avoiding invoicing.)

If this resonates:

• Share it.
• Know someone drowning in AI anxiety? Send them our way.
• Want to partner? Reach out.
• Want to build with us? My inbox is open.

2025 was a year to find our footing. 2026 is the year AI Experts runs. 🚀

Lucas Erb is the founder of AIExperts.com. He still works most Saturdays but remains militant about Sundays off. Reach him at lucas@aiexperts.com or connect on LinkedIn.