EP3: The Rise of AI and the Threat to my Comeback
In this episode Mundo Sanchez reflects on six weeks of unemployment while attempting to launch a software product in a rapidly evolving AI landscape. He describes how advances in AI are making his envisioned product increasingly commodifiable, forcing him to find a unique value proposition that AI cannot quickly replicate. Financial pressures mount as he faces $15,000 in unexpected property repairs, ongoing maintenance costs, and a recent investment in a data provider that has driven his net income to zero, with a potential future shortfall of $2,500 per month if he upgrades the data package. The product’s performance metrics reveal 255 total sign‑ups, only 27 paid users (a peak of 35), and significant activation challenges—users struggle to set up a buy box, leading to many free‑trial sign‑ups that never convert, compounded by a lack of email follow‑up. He is working 70‑80 hours per week, feels guilt over limited time with his young children, and worries about burnout. He outlines a growth plan: February for development, March‑May for aggressive scaling, aiming for a ten‑fold increase in users, and considers pushing his weekly workload to 90‑100 hours. Throughout, he uses the monologue as a therapeutic outlet, emphasizing resilience, the feeling of being tested, and a determination not to quit despite the mounting setbacks.
Chapters
For today's episode, it is going to be a roller coaster of emotions. So I am about, um, I'd say about 6 weeks have gone by, which is crazy to think that I've been unemployed for about 6 weeks. A lot has happened. It's just crazy how fast technology is evolving. And so I'm going all in on building this software product, and the things that I envisioned are happening so fast that people are able to build some of these things themselves, which is a very scary thought because now, in which something I was previously building, which I thought was really not something that the average person is capable of doing, which makes it— dropped my recorder— makes it a no-brainer for people to buy a software product and pay monthly. Now it's a serious threat because people can spin up their own OpenClaw or whatever AI assistant they're using and go ahead and build stuff on their own. And so I have to find a way to survive in that kind of environment. And, you know, I still don't have any active income coming in. It puts me in a really, really difficult spot. It's like, well, do I go find a job? Do I look for a part-time job? Like, at what point should I start doing that? Versus a trade-off of going all in, right? You know, I say I'm here to go all in, and then yet I still have those doubts creeping up in my head of like, am I on the right path? Am I doing the right thing? And you know, if anything, I'm using this session today and probably, you know, all my other podcast episodes as a therapy session for myself, actually, just talking out loud. It actually helps me process and think through things. I'd say today is the day where I'm really mentally struggling with those thoughts of, am I on the right path? So I figured it was fitting for me to record another episode. It's, you know, I also think that I'm being tested. You know, God is testing me of how bad do you actually want this? And I just have constant barriers put in front of me, and it's almost comical. You know, I've had probably to the tune of $15,000 of repairs that I've had to pay for over the past few weeks. Granted, I have no income coming in. I had another— I had a subfloor collapse. It was in a duplex, and I thought that was an isolated incident. And now I received word that the other unit for that duplex, that subfloor has also collapsed. And it's just like, wow. You know, there's, and I got a bunch of other repairs that are, you know, actively still happening right now, plumbing leaks, which, you know, these days, anything that breaks is at least $1,200, $1,500. So you got multiple maintenance issues going on right now and it's It's pretty comical, you know, when I, when I think I have everything stabilized and it just keeps pouring and pouring and pouring and putting me into a bigger and bigger hole to climb out of. And then the software product itself, I am trying to build this thing as fast as I possibly can to get it where it needs to be. This month I invested in a data provider that took my net income down to zero. So now I'm at zero, and next month I was planning on making this upgrade, which would put me about 20— that would put me below zero. That would put me at negative $2,500 a month if I make that next upgrade of data package. I may or may not delay that. We'll see. I'm going to see if I can drive enough interest and traffic to the platform to see if I can buy myself some time and increase revenue a little bit without having to make that huge jump. But making that jump is, it seems inevitable based on the direction that I'm seeing tech and everything going. I'm racing against all these tools. And at the end of the day, I have to build something that people cannot build on their own. And when I say people, I mean really AI, that AI itself cannot replicate very quickly. So it has to be so differentiated that, um, that it can survive, right? And not only survive, but thrive. That's a pretty scary place. Cause you know, talk about going negative 2,500. So, you know, we're not even at zero. We're at negative 2,500 if I make that move. And then it's trying to climb my way up and make enough to survive off of and pay my bills. So we are talking about like the most, most historic comeback I've ever seen for me personally, of just where I'm at today versus where I need to be at in 4 or 5 months before, you know, all my cash runs out and it's dwindling by the day because it's not just living expenses I'm paying for, it's properties. Empty properties, repairs, all those, all that stuff's coming out of nowhere, out of left field. And I mean, there is no positive cash flow coming out of any property pretty much because everything's just being smoked and then some in capex, maintenance breakdowns, all that kind of stuff. And It, it makes it really, really difficult, you know, to keep pushing through. Um, you know, I feel like a really shitty father at the moment because I just don't spend the time that I want to spend with the kids and doing stuff. And I really want to help educate them and transfer a lot of the knowledge and everything I've learned and help them avoid all those mistakes. Luckily they're 5 and, you know, 4 and a half and 3. So at that age, there's not much knowledge transfer that can happen. But, you know, I just envisioned my role as a father being different than how I'm playing it now. And it really doesn't make me happy. Um, but I, you know, I have no other choice at the moment. I have to work all the time and It's, it's almost like a mental illness right now of like, I feel guilty every minute I'm not working and I feel like I'm not even working hard enough. I feel like I've been coasting and not doing what I need to do and it's been comfortable in my working schedule. I mean, yeah, I've eliminated 30 minutes there, 30 minutes back. So that's an hour of travel that I don't have to drive to and from work. And then I've eliminated, you know, let's call it 45 minutes puttin' around in the morning, you know, getting dressed, shower, you know, all that kind of stuff and getting in the process of leaving the house. And so we'll call it an hour and a half that I've gotten back in my day every day, just by eliminating the travel and working from home. But that's, uh, outside that, I mean, I've always worked a lot and, uh, I don't feel like I've stepped it up to where it needs to be because, you know, if I had to add up, I would say I'm probably working somewhere between, depending on the week, 70 and 90 hours. Nah, I wouldn't say 90. I'd say between 70 and 80 hours a week is what I'm working right now. And I just feel like it's not enough. I feel like I need to be suffering more to really earn it, or, you know, I have to have this daily suffering to feel like I'm just reaching the tip of where I need to be putting in— where I'm putting in the right amount of effort to get the right result. And I feel like that's just not happening right now. And I'm also concerned of like going off the deep end on that and burning out, right? I mean, I have to, this is a marathon and, uh, I can't burn out. And a lot of what I do is intellectual, so I can't really go for long periods of time with, you know, very, very little sleep because then I'm not functional and then that affects productivity. So it's a hard balance. And I'm trying to figure that out. But just given the amount, the sheer amount of financial pressure that is just quite literally thrown onto me daily with all these repairs and breakdowns. I mean, honestly, it's the repairs and the breakdowns of all the properties. That are just crushing me because you can't even plan for it. You can't forecast that on a spreadsheet, nothing. It just, you get a phone call and it's just like, oh, here we go. How much is this going to cost me? And it's just, you know, I'm trying to plan my budget. I'm trying to plan everything. And that just blows it all up every month. And that's been going on for well over a year. And it's just, you get to a point where it's just, emotionally draining where enough's enough. And I honestly feel like I'm at that point where I just have to go nuts on digging in and reaching a whole nother level that I don't even know that exists right now because I feel like there's just no way out of this outside of a sheer amount of volume of work, and I have to transform into the next version of myself that doesn't exist today. And I don't know how I'm going to get there. Constant doubt in my head. At the moment. You know, the other thing that, that does bother me is not that I need a pity party by any means, but you know, I talk to a lot of people and they're like, oh, you know what, you're so smart or whatever, and you're going to do great. And I'm not worried about you at all. And I'm like, pfft, well, I am certainly worried. You know, it's like, oh, you'll just figure it out. Like, no, that's not, that's not how it goes. Like, This is something I am very worried about on a daily basis, minute by minute. It's just constant doubt in my head every single second of the day. And that's an enormous pressure to have. And that's, that's what I gotta get figured out. You know, I've lost I've lost a handful of members on the software, which, you know, I expected. Um, there was things that I feel like the onboarding or the activation for a normal user was not where it needed to be in that whole like onboarding experience. People need to like come onto the platform immediately. Feel the win and the value of using the platform. And I honestly didn't think setting up a buy box was that much work, but apparently everyone else is telling me it is. So I've been racing against the clock to try to fix that activation problem. And I started running paid ads recently. So again, that's more money I'm spending on. Actually honestly doing pretty well with the paid ads. Like it's, it's actually running and getting people to sign up, but it's all free trials. And I'm not getting people to actually sign up, you know, I'm just getting free trials and they just go dead, but I have zero email campaign follow-ups. I have like nothing literally. And that's a problem. Like getting people activated on the platform is a huge problem. So I have to find a way to get people activated. Have to. And this huge, um, last round of development that I'm working on is hopefully that missing piece to get people signed up. You know, so I got 255 people, um, signed up currently. On, like, as just like members, that's between free and paid. And there's 27 paid right now. I think at my peak I was at like 35. So I'm clearly, if you understand math, I'm headed in the wrong direction. And I think it was just this activation piece is people really struggled with getting the core value out of it that I know is there. They just couldn't get past. The work to get there. And, um, there's a lot to be said in that statement, you know, for life in general. Not that, you know, first of all, you shouldn't be making people work to use your software. Like, that's not the point. But the point in that for life is you got to get past the work to get on the other side. And that's what I'm trying to see currently in this moment. And it's really hard because I am working as hard as I can. And I just feel like I'm just getting beaten down every day by something that's costing me money. It makes it really, really hard to keep pushing when you, you're just getting loss after loss after loss after loss. Loss after loss after loss after loss, you know, and I have a lot of perseverance, but you would like to think that that equation gets balanced by a few wins, and it's just— just when I think I reach a new low, it somehow keeps digging deeper and creating a new low lower than the previous low, and that's where I'm at right now. You know, that's, that's, this is, uh, currently at the bottom. You know, I thought I was at the bottom in episode 1, episode 2, and now here 6, 7 weeks later, episode 3, and, um, continue to sinking down. It almost feels like a sinking ship, honestly. Um, but on the other side, Bro, I literally was beaten so hard not to quit. It's just not in my DNA. I don't quit, but it, it is pretty tough to keep going. So with that being said, this might have to kick off the chapter of going into a very, very— I don't want to say dark place, but a very unhealthy place in terms of time committed. I think me, you know, I need to be pushing that 90 to 100 hours a week. I think at this moment it's just, I don't know any other way to get there other than just work harder. That, that's just all I know. Um, surely if I just keep doing that, things have to turn around at some point. And so that's what I'll leave with today is that, uh, never give up and keep working and keep pushing, and time will tell if this will age well or not. You know, I gotta have just an absolute monster month. You know, my plan was to spend the month of February building the software product and the month of March, you know, selling the software product. I feel like I'm a couple of weeks behind. I need a few more weeks of development. But March, April, May has to just be monstrous in terms of growth. Like, I need to be in a whole nother different place if I'm going to— I mean, I got to grow at least 10x from where I'm at now. So that's where we got to be and that's what we got to figure out. So I will get my ass back to work and I will see you guys next time. And it'll be interesting to track the KPIs and over time, over each episode, and you can follow along and I'll share. I think I'll start sharing more tactical information on, you know, what I'm doing to get to this climb, because I think that's going to be really important in this journey. You know, I've spent probably the first couple of episodes talking about really just mindset and some of the struggles I'm having. And, you know, um, we need to, we need to stop talking about that and start getting to work. And I'll show you the path on how I get there, or you'll watch me burn in flames. It'll be one of the two. It'll be a really good success story. Or not. Alright, well, I'll see y'all guys next time.
