u/treysmith_

ill go first. i built an agent to monitor my competitors facebook ad creatives and summarize what changed every week. seemed like a waste of time when i started but it ended up being one of the most useful things i run because i noticed patterns in their creative testing that i could steal for my own campaigns.

whats yours? bonus points if you thought it was pointless but turned out to be actually useful

not looking for tool recommendations, more curious about actual workflows people have set up.

for me its lead follow up and ad reporting. i used to spend 2-3 hours a day on follow up emails and pulling numbers from facebook ads. now its all automated and i just review the summary each morning.

whats the one thing ai handles for you that you used to do manually? bonus points if its something boring that nobody talks about

ill go first. i spent way too long pricing based on what i thought people could afford instead of what the result was worth. charged $500 for something that was saving clients $5k+ per month because i was scared of hearing no.

once i raised prices the quality of clients went up dramatically and the ones who said yes actually implemented what i recommended instead of ghosting after the first week.

whats your pricing story? what did you get wrong and how did you fix it

for me it was bookkeeping and chasing invoices. i was spending like 5 hours a week on stuff that had zero impact on revenue but felt urgent because it was right in front of me.

once i finally set up systems to handle it i got that time back and put it into sales which is the one thing that actually moves the needle.

curious what your version of this is. whats eating your time that you know deep down isnt the highest value use of your day

for me it was signups. i was so focused on getting more people to sign up that i completely ignored what happened after they got in. turns out most of them never came back after day one.

when i finally shifted to tracking activation rate (did they actually use the core feature in the first session) everything changed. fewer vanity numbers but way more actual users who stuck around and eventually paid.

curious what metric you were tracking early that you later realized was either misleading or totally irrelevant. what did you switch to instead

i used to try to be everywhere. instagram, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, youtube, email, reddit, facebook groups. the result was mediocre content on every platform and zero real traction on any of them.

about a year ago i picked one channel and committed to going deep on it for 6 months. no shiny objects, no fomo about what was trending somewhere else. just one platform done really well.

the results were way better than anything i got from spreading thin. actual engaged followers, real conversations, inbound leads.

curious if anyone else has done this. did you pick one channel and go all in? what happened? did you miss the other platforms or was the focus worth it

we all have that one thing we do manually every week that we know could be automated but we keep putting it off because its "not that bad" or "ill get to it next week."

for me it was client reporting. every friday i was spending 2 hours pulling numbers from different tools and putting them into a doc for each client. finally automated it and now it takes 5 minutes to review what the system already built.

curious what yours is. whats the thing you keep doing manually that you know you shouldnt be

this is something i still struggle with honestly. ive killed ads too early that probably would have worked and ive let ads run too long hoping they would turn around when they clearly werent going to.

right now my general rule is: if an ad has spent 2x my target cpa without a conversion i kill it. and if it has a ctr below 1% after 1000 impressions the creative probably isnt working.

but i know other people have totally different frameworks. some wait for statistical significance, some go purely by gut, some use automated rules.

whats your actual decision making process? do you have hard rules or is it more of a feel thing

everyone talks about this concept but nobody ever describes the actual moment it clicked for them.

for me it was when i took a week off and realized my business basically stopped functioning without me. nothing happened with leads, nobody followed up with clients, no reports got sent. i came back to a mess and realized i wasnt running a business i was just being self employed with extra steps.

that week forced me to start building actual systems that could run without me touching them every day. it was uncomfortable and slow at first but now i can disappear for two weeks and everything keeps running.

what was your moment? was it a specific event or just a gradual realization

something ive noticed talking to other founders is that the way you spend your time at $1k mrr is completely different from $10k mrr.

early on its all building and shipping features. every hour goes into the product. but somewhere around the $5-10k mark the bottleneck shifts from product to distribution and retention.

for me the biggest shift was going from spending 80% of my time building to spending 60% on talking to customers, optimizing onboarding, and figuring out why people churn. the product was already good enough. the growth came from understanding customers better not shipping more features.

for those of you who crossed $10k mrr, what changed in how you allocated your time? and when did you realize the shift needed to happen

we always talk about adding things to grow. new marketing channels, new tools, new hires. but honestly the biggest growth periods in my business came from removing stuff.

for me it was stopping the habit of saying yes to every client. i was taking on anyone who could pay and it was killing my margins and my sanity. the day i got specific about who i serve and started saying no to people who werent a great fit, everything improved. better clients, better results, more referrals, less stress.

what did you stop doing that ended up being the best decision for your business

not looking for theoretical use cases or product demos. genuinely curious what other business owners are running day to day with ai agents.

for context i run a couple software companies and a coaching business. the agents i use daily handle things like monitoring ad performance, sorting and prioritizing incoming leads, drafting follow up sequences, and pulling reports i used to build manually in spreadsheets.

none of it is fancy. most of it is just "do this boring thing reliably so i dont have to think about it." but its probably saved me 15+ hours a week at this point.

what does your actual production setup look like? not what youre experimenting with, what you actually rely on every day