In one corner of the internet, you have established professionals claiming AI will never be able to do what they do. That their expertise is too nuanced, too hard-won, too human to be replicated by a chatbot.

In the other corner, you have weekend warriors claiming expertise is dead. Calling engineers irrelevant. Posting “I built a SaaS in three hours with Cursor” on LinkedIn like a trophy.

Both groups are wrong. Both groups are also right. Most importantly, both groups are missing the opportunity.

When I read this kind of thing, all I can think about is YouTube and plumbing. Stay with me.

YouTube has contributed to millions of homeowners' belief that they can fix their own toilets, rewire light switches, patch drywall. And for the most part, they can. The simple jobs, which only ever went to the cheapest contractor anyway, are more often done by the homeowner with a phone propped on the counter.

This means plumbers lost work. Bad plumbers, that is.

The good ones gained a new kind of customer: the person who watched three tutorials, made a confident attempt... and flooded their bathroom.

That person doesn't call the cheapest option. They call the one who clearly knows what they're doing. Often, they'll try to call the very person whose DIY tutorial they watched.

AI is doing the same thing to software, to consulting, to creative work. 41% of all code is now AI-generated. 68% of small businesses use AI regularly, up from 48% eighteen months ago. The barrier to "good enough" has collapsed.

That scares a lot of founders.

But I think it should excite them.

Because the playbook for this moment already exists. The founders who use it are turning DIY floods into their best-performing marketing channel.

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James Ashford had been a close-up magician for fifteen years before he ever touched software.

Card tricks teach you one thing above all else: your audience is going to resist you. They're watching your hands, looking for the slip. If they're a good crowd, you have five minutes to change their mind.

As strange as it sounds, Ashford brought that same energy to accountancy.

Ashford had a marketing agency fail due to an inefficient approach to pricing. That's to say, he just didn't know how to set good prices. After licking his wounds, he started consulting for other firms on pricing - teaching them what he wished he had known.

He mainly landed accounting agencies as clients, but found the problem was identical anyway. Pricing lived in someone's head, or in a spreadsheet so complex that only the founder could operate it.

He went searching for a better solution, and eventually came across an accountant who'd built a pricing methodology that worked brilliantly, but lived in a clunky Excel file. They did an equity swap, then got to work productizing this method. The MVP cost £4,000 and took three months; they called it GoProposal.

While it was being built, Ashford decided to... write a book?

He took two weeks to write down everything he knew. Called it Selling to Serve. Then he used it to build a waitlist before GoProposal even launched.

Obviously this proved something for him, because Ashford then became committed to giving all his knowledge the rest away.

Daily solution videos. Weekly webinars where he taught his full pricing methodology, holding nothing back. He spoke with an accountant every single day for five years.

He called it the "celebrity chef" model.

"Market like a celebrity chef," he said on the SaaS Podcast. "Give it all away, yet [customers] still want to go to his restaurant."

On webinars, he'd tell accountants straight: "I'm going to tell you how to do it without my software. If you want to do it quicker, buy ours."

Some people took the free advice and ran with it (which isn't a bad thing. We'll explore this later). A greater percentage tried, realized how tedious it was, and came back for the software.

Pre-educated. Pre-convinced. Pre-sold.

Within a few years: over 1,100 customers, £1.5M in annual recurring revenue, no outside funding, a team of twelve.

In 2021, Sage acquired GoProposal for an eight-figure sum. 100% cash. 90% ownership retained at exit.

It's an awesome story, but there's one part I keep coming back to.

"Only 3% of any market is ready to buy," Ashford said. "But a massive 30% is ready to be educated to buy."

That 30% is growing fast. 44% of profitable SaaS products are now run by a single founder. More people are building. More people are hitting the ceiling of what they can build alone.

And when they hit that ceiling, they look for the person who taught them what they know. The plumber whose video they watched before they flooded the bathroom.

So, in the wake of AI, the question becomes: are you visible enough for people to find you when DIY fails them?

What Ashford describes is something we call a flywheel, because each step feeds the next, and it all comes back around. The more you teach, the more people attempt the DIY version. The more they attempt it, the more they discover they need you.

Here's the framework.

Every business has a core methodology. The thing you do for clients that produces results.

We used to be taught to guard it. To treat it like a secret sauce.

Stop doing that.

Write down your process, start to finish. Break it into functional steps, and be specific. Name the tools, the sequence, the common mistakes.

If someone followed your instructions to the letter, they should be able to get the job done. Maybe not as well as you could've done it, but 70% of the way there, on their own.

Getting them to that 70% is your content strategy. The remaining 30%, comprised of judgment calls, edge cases, and "it depends" moments, is what people will pay you for.

Figure out where your ideal customers spend their time. LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack, a niche community. Then study what makes content succeed on that platform.

Once you know the "how" of content creation, start making it. Each piece of content should teach a specific part of your methodology. I'm talking actual steps; full breakdowns. Skip the "DM me for details" and give them the real thing.

Pick one aspect of your framework or system and build a tool that lets people try it themselves. AI coding tools let you build functional web apps in days, even with zero technical background.

The tool should do the simple version of what your paid service does. It gives people a taste, shows competence, and creates a natural upgrade path.

If software feels like a stretch, build a template. A calculator. A checklist. A free course module. The principle is the same: demonstrate, don't describe.

This is the piece most founders miss.

When someone tries your free methodology and hits a wall, they need a clear path back to you. A specific offer. Easy to find, easy to say yes to.

Build an offer for the person who tried, got 80% there, and now needs help with the last 20%. Frame it in a way that acknowledges their pre-existing work: limited scope, clear deliverable, defined timeline.

The demand is already there. 8,000+ startups need rescue engineering from vibe-coded products. Cleanup costs run $50K to $500K each.

The same pattern is emerging in SEO, design, copywriting, financial modeling, and every other domain where AI tools let people skip the learning curve.

Half will fix it themselves with your guidance. Good. They'll tell people about you. (And those testimonials become your proof stack for the next wave.)

The other half will hire you to finish it. Even better.

Either way, the flywheel is spinning. You taught them. They tried. They came back. And the next person who finds your content starts the cycle again.

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