On hallucinations, real people, and deep thinking

As an entrepreneur by heart, I’ve shaped a good chunk of my life around building businesses, processes, management workflows, recruitment, sales and marketing funnels, technical proficiency and automation.

Ever since my years as a kid, tech was a rising category. Organic search and social media were booming. Digital entrepreneurship was on the rise.

While there are always nuances in launching businesses or growth strategies, the general SaaS playbook for Hotmail or Dropbox or Airbnb could have been replicated for the most part in 2015, 2018, 2020, 2022. If you read Lean Startup by Eric Ries, the principles were still valid in the early 2020s.

This no longer holds true in 2025.

The clash of organic + AI overviews, the entire AI pivot for content marketing, Cursor and Bolt building apps, and oversaturation of the product space - all of that has populated the web and made both the product space AND building an audience a completely different turn of events.

The fact that we can build a simplified CRM in a day without coding skills will never replace HubSpot or Salesforce, but a chunk of their audience doesn’t need the full suite of bells and whistles.

And with many hundreds of CRMs, how products got launched 20 years ago has changed dramatically.

The PPC and SEM spaces have evolved with noise and oversaturation, to the extent of banner blindness.

We live in different times

And nearly everything I’ve been learning, applying, and optimizing for over the past 2 decades is challenged today.

• All business lessons and best practices

• Software engineering may be a niche skills for programming microwaves and robots

• Digital marketing in its core form (email, ads, social, affiliate) has shifted dramatically - especially in the AI era

• The tools and instruments we’ve used - text and programming code - may be irrelevant for 90% of the projects out there

Going through this gradual transformation over the past two years, I’ve been transitioning my own priorities into how I spend my time and where, what our teams are involved with, and the core initiatives and activities.

This deep thinking exercise led to starting my musings section on my blog, ditching frameworks and workflows (that ChatGPT can spit out today) for deep thinking on topics such as “Social networks have degraded dramatically and are unlikely to survive.”

And I’ve been spending more time on 1:1s and working directly with individuals, after spending 16 years in scaling up efforts from small classrooms and meetings into globally published content and videos, webinars, and recorded sessions observed by tens of thousands of people.

But as life is full of ups and downs - and transitioning between extremes so we can find the golden middle ground - we’re now testing the limits of AI, reaching a ceiling in evolutionary speed and capabilities, degrading model efficiency (from outages to poorly trained LLMs), and hallucinations that become harder to tell (compared to GPT 3.5 and pretty obvious misalignments between right or wrong).

I end up seeing more posts, reading more newsletters, jumping into Slack conversations and real time discussions around epic hallucinations and pulling back on some of these integrations today.

We see that at work with certain prompt flows we built a year ago, returning random results today. As LLMs get trained on more data, and this data being AI-generated with hallucinations - plus random Reddit posts - new results are suspicious at best.

Even if you upload a book into NotebookLM, you’ll end up hearing facts that don’t exist in the book copy.

Not to mention the possible censorship of OpenAI and Google deciding on what they feed their systems. Ever thought about that while trying to generate a DALL-E photo of Super Mario, failing to render because of trademarks? That’s how moderation works on top. And the same may be valid for politics, historical events, and even business strategies.

So while the digital landscape is polluted and audience/contacts are gold, we’re still redefining the rules of digital publishing and product development in the process.

Mario

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📃 Nvidia unveils desktop AI supercomputer. At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced Project Digits, a compact AI supercomputer aimed at developers, data scientists, and students.

📃 Holiday online sales up with 8.7%. Online holiday spending rose 8.7% to $241.4 billion, fueled by deep discounts and AI-powered chatbots, according to Adobe Analytics.

📃 Comcast unveils Universal Ads for SMBs. Comcast's new platform simplifies buying TV ads, making it as easy as social media ads. Backed by partners like Roku and NBCUniversal, it includes AI tools to create ads and attract more brands to TV.

📃 Meta introduces community notes. Meta will replace its fact-checking program with a community-driven notes system, aiming to simplify moderation and prioritize free expression, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced.

📃 Gold steadies as Fed maintains caution. Gold pared earlier gains as robust US labor data reinforced expectations of a cautious Fed approach to rate cuts, with inflation and job market resilience keeping investors on edge.

Let’s see the latest offers from Flippa. Don’t forget to sign up for their newsletter for daily/weekly/monthly offers such as these.

AI-Powered Video Editing App - This app enabling users to edit photos and videos maintains a 4.6-star rating across 4.4K+ reviews and has generated a TTM revenue of $508.5K.

• Monthly profit: $16,277

• Average monthly downloads: 66,584

• Business age: 2 years

3-Product Business Building Portfolio - This business features a portfolio of three products which include an ad marketplace, analytics SaaS, and a digital course.

• Monthly profit: $11,024

• Average order value: $151

• Business age: 2 years

Pickleball Paddle Ecommerce - This ecommerce business featuring a brand of pickleball paddles, gear, and apparel has generated a TTM revenue of $217.3K.

• Monthly profit: $10,725

• Average order value: $123

• Business age: 4 years

Need My Help?

Keeping myself busy - here are the main projects I focus on:

🌐 Scaling WordPress past 100M views? DevriX provides martech retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo and we manage high-traffic platforms, B2B SaaS apps, partnership management solutions, supporting $10M - $250M businesses with scalability, custom funnels, CRO, big data augmentation, AI-driven processes, HubSpot workflows, programmatic SEO - and everything a modern business requires in digital in 2025.

🚀  Work 1:1 with me? At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups.

📈 International founder looking into US LLCs? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.

📊 Into digital M&A? I work closely with Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides the tools to list your business and close the deal.

💼 Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink and use Equity to manage your ESOP tables in-house.