Entrepreneur, tinkerer, coffee lover, Jesus follower. I make cool things on the internet.
The post The Founder s Pendulum: Why You Feel Like a Genius and a Fraud in the Same Month appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . Eighteen months ago, if you d told me my company would cross a million dollars a year in revenue, I would have wept with joy. I m serious. I would have printed that sentence, framed it, and hung it over my desk like a diploma. This week, sitting comfortably…
The post Bolt-On AI Features Won t Save These Billion-Dollar Business Categories appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . Somewhere in a product meeting right now, a team is celebrating a feature they just shipped. They bolted AI onto their app. A little sparkle icon in the corner. A chatbot that writes captions. A smart suggestions panel nobody asked for. They high-fived. They updated…
The post ChatGPT Isn t an AI, Here s What It Actually Is appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . You ve been using AI for months. Maybe years. You ve got opinions about it. Preferences. You ve told people which one you like best. You ve recommended it to friends, defended it in arguments, and built parts of your workflow around it. And there s a decent chance you ve been confused about…
The post A 68-Year-Old Prediction Is Coming True Right Now in AI appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . Thousands of AI startups launched in the last two years. Most of them are already gone. Not because they had bad ideas. Not because they couldn t execute. Not because the big players crushed them. Because a British cyberneticist named W. Ross Ashby figured out their fate in 1956.…
The post The Hard Truth About AI Agents (And How to Fix It with VALUE) appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . Somebody you follow online has an AI agent that writes four blog posts a day. Fully researched. Cited sources. Embedded videos. Internal links. The whole production. And every time they show it off, the comments fill up with the same breathless reaction. This is insane. The…
The post Stop Counting AI Pennies. It s Embarrassing. appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . You re broke in your mind, not your wallet. That s the only explanation for what I keep seeing play out over and over again. Someone pays $20 a month for AI, uses it throughout the month, and then the moment their usage starts running low, the panic sets in. Suddenly they re rationing.…
The post Why People Actually Buy Products (And What Most Developers Get Wrong) appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . Someone called Magai a wrapper recently. I ve heard it before. I ll hear it again. And every time, it comes from the same place: a person who has spent so much time thinking in systems and architecture that they ve completely lost the plot on why humans actually open…
The post The Marketing Lie Killing Your Success appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . Every entrepreneur I talk to has the same marketing story. They hired someone to write blog posts. Or they committed to a YouTube channel. Or they spent three months building the perfect lead magnet. The PDF, the landing page, the welcome sequence, the follow-up drip, the whole architecture. They…
The post The AI Cargo Cult: Why Millions of People Are Getting Results and Still Doing It Wrong appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . There is something deeply unsettling happening in the world of AI education right now. Not a scandal. Not a controversy. Something quieter. And far more dangerous. Millions of people are learning how to use AI from people who don t actually understand…
The post OpenAI Just Killed Sora. Here s Why You Should Have Seen It Coming. appeared first on Dustin Stout by Dustin W. Stout . Six months. That s how long it took for OpenAI s standalone video app to go from most downloaded app in the App Store to we re saying goodbye. If that surprises you, we need to talk. Because this was one of the most predictable product deaths in recent tech history. And…