Saturday Sessions: Best time to start a business

I don't talk about my story much in this email.

Partly because it's messy. Partly because I've been more focused on the practical stuff - how to use AI, how to build things, how to not get left behind.

But it's Saturday. Story time!

So here's how I ended up doing... whatever this AI stuff is.

The Weird Path

Just after university, I co-founded a TV station in Vietnam.

You know, as one does.

Two founders. Zero experience. 250 staff headcount within a year and on air in nine months from a standing start.

I remember going to Cannes to buy TV shows from NBC Universal, BBC, all the big players. At drinks afterwards, one guy admitted he'd assumed my dad was about to show up… He couldn't believe he'd been negotiating with someone so young over email all that time.

Funnily enough, I introduced telenovelas to Vietnam through that guy. You're welcome, Vietnam!

After a couple of years we sold up. Got married, moved to America. Life got very comfortable very quickly.

Houston mansion. Cliffside house in La Jolla, California. Then New York for my MBA. West Village apartment, then Brooklyn.

Then it all collapsed.

Got divorced. Lost all the money. Classic stuff.

I had a decision to make. Be poor and miserable in London (expensive city for misery let metell you), or do something … different.

So I moved to Beijing with basically nothing. Tiny bedroom. Fresh start.

Figured if I was going to feel sorry for myself I may as well learn Chinese.

The Book That Changed Everything

While I was there, living in what was essentially a cupboard with a window, I read Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Work Week.

If you haven't read it: it's about building a remote, location-independent life instead of trading time for money forever.

The calculus was pretty simple. Stay in a job, safe but limited. Or build something of your own, risky but uncapped.

I had nothing to lose. So risk taking wasn’t hard! So I started my first online business: Hanzi WallChart.

Giant posters of the most common Chinese characters.

TERRIBLE business, by the way. Heavy. Awkward size. Easy to damage in shipping. Expensive to make, cheap to sell. Nightmare product all around!

But I learnt something crucial: this "making money on the internet" thing could actually work.

The moment I properly believed it was when I travelled overland from Beijing to Mumbai - through Tibet, Nepal, India - and my little poster business kept running without me. Orders coming in. Money hitting the account. While I was on a bus somewhere in the Himalayas.

That changes how you see work forever.

Still to this day the only notification I have on my phone are Stripe payment notifications. There’s something rather magical about sleeping and waking up to income…

Twenty Years of Building

Since then? Twenty-plus businesses. Bought some. Sold some. Most came to nothing. That's just part of the game.

But here's the thing nobody tells you about starting a business back then.

It was HARD. Properly, painfully hard.

You had to build the product. Build the website. Work out eCommerce (nightmare in 2010). Marketing plan. Social media strategy. Customer support. Accounting.

ALL of it. By yourself.

You had three choices:

• Hire someone - expensive when you have no cash lol

• Team up with someone - give away part of your business before you've even started.

• Do it yourself - cheap but glacially slow.

I remember spending weeks learning WordPress just to put up a basic website. Months figuring out how to process payments. Entire afternoons Googling "how to make shipping labels."

The technical barriers were immense. Most ideas died not because they were bad, but because the founder ran out of energy before they could build the damn thing. Getting to the starting line was HARD.

Now? Nah.

I've been able to go from idea to fully working prototype in MINUTES. Not months. Not weeks. Minutes.

Working website. Product mock-ups. Sales copy. Customer flows. Just... done.

The barriers to building have been utterly demolished.

Shit, the other day I build a tool in the bath. Had an idea, grabbed my phone, had Claude Code work out a prototype for me, deployed it whilst I was drying off and then went to see how it looked on my computer.

I was invited to Lovable recently as part of their Lovable Shipped competition. Met ten winners. Most of whom had never touched code before.

Now they all have cash-flowing businesses.

Read that again. Non-technical people with actual revenue-generating products they built themselves.

There's a quiet revolution happening in how we create businesses.

I can only see if because I used to build businesses the hard dumb way. So I can see the MASSIVE shift we’ve taken.

The Excuse Problem

Over the years, I've met countless people who tell me they have an "amazing idea."

They just can't build it. Some reason or another.

They need cash. Or they need a technical co-founder. Or they need more time. Or they need to learn to code first.

There was one guy I ran into several times over about five years. Every time I saw him: "Still working on that app?" Him: "Still learning to code. My Python is good. Now just need to work out SQL.” Lordy…

Five years. No app. No progress. No business.

AI has come along and removed all those excuses. Because that’s what they were: excuses. Reasons not to actually get shit done - barriers, friction, problems. Always something getting in the way.

That’s evaporated. Now you can just implement your idea immediately. This isn’t hyperbole - I mean immediate. All those ideas you have squirrelled away can now just be done.

And that scares people.

Because now you're left asking different questions:

• What if my idea is crap?

• What if people laugh at it?

• What if no one cares?

These are actually the RIGHT questions. The questions that matter. We're finally past the "I can't build it" stage. We’re onto the “OK it’s built now what" stage.

Which has always been the hard part! It’s just most people never even got to this part!

Best Time. Worst Time.

So we're in a weird spot. The best of times, the worst of times.

Best time to build a business - because the barriers have collapsed.

Worst time to build a business - because so many options exist that you can drown in possibility.

If you're an over-thinker like me (hi!), this is a nightmare scenario. Endless tools. Endless opportunities. Endless directions.

What AI business? What niche? What platform? What model?

Paralysing.

But here's what I've learnt from twenty years and twenty businesses:

The answer isn't finding the perfect idea.

The answer is picking one thing and actually building it.

The people winning right now aren't smarter. They're not more technical. They just started the damn thing.

What's Next

That's why I do this newsletter. That's why I built the community. That's why I keep banging on about AI.

Because the gap between "wanting to build something" and "actually building it" has never been smaller.

And I don't want you to be the guy I meet in five years who's still "learning to code." I’ll be really annoyed (in a cute flustered British way…)

The tools are here. The opportunity is here. One unlike anything I’ve seen in 20 years of starting and building businesses.

Not sure where to start? I recommend Freedom OS:

Honestly: this is it. It’s go time.

Keep Prompting,

Kyle

P.S. If you've been sitting on an idea, this is me giving you a nudge. Pick the simplest version. Build something this weekend. It won't be perfect. It doesn't need to be. It just needs to exist.

Come and tell us about it in the Community. Get support. Get testers. Get cofounders. Just get moving.