Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of running my own company, inspired by industry giants and eager to make a mark as they did.

I had a stark realization in my teenage years after talking to my then mentors: marketing is the secret missing ingredient.

Many great product-focused startups silently die without anyone ever knowing.

Depressing, yet factual.

Since I wanted to operate a B2B company, I decided to start with SEO and content marketing. It had a solid track record of securing leads and required very little starting capital.

That’s where I spent my first 5 working years: 3 years working as head of content marketing for different agencies and another 2 running my own agency working with funded US tech companies.

Unfortunately, post-COVID, the realm became dominated by a single mantra among clients: ROI, ROI, ROI.

Clients prioritized quick bucks or immediate savings over an established long-term strategy, and slowly my passion suffocated in a sea of soulless meetings and cutthroat competition.

Then it hit me.

I was making good money, but I wasn’t learning anything new.

During a routine client meeting, with yet another discussion centered not on quality or innovation but on potential savings and quick returns.

“Our prospects won’t even notice the quality drop. Can we just use AI and push out MORE content?” they said.

This relentless focus on immediate gains over long-term strategy was disheartening.

It wasn’t just the monotony; it was the realization that my values were increasingly at odds with the industry’s direction.

I was so tired of seeing poorly written, ‘nothing-burger’ articles on Google.

The market had become a bloody battle over who could offer the cheapest content, with little regard for loyalty or quality.

I was slowly looking for a new direction…

Aaaaand I’m Out Moment

When ChatGPT-3.5 came out, I disregarded the impact it would make, correctly assessing that the quality was worse than your average writer for the topics we were covering. But when ChatGPT-4 was released, I knew everyone was in trouble.

I accurately predicted two major areas of impact:

  • Pricing Pressure: Pricing content at a premium was going to be difficult because rarely was the C-suite informed enough to see the difference between an amazing content piece and a decent one, but they knew the difference in the price they were paying.

  • Global Competition: Way more competition, especially from countries where lower living expenses could allow them to charge packages at razor-thin margins and STILL cover all expenses.

New Beginning

I thought it was a perfect opportunity to move to programming because I thought I was ready to start building cool products I could have control over.

Feeling like a little kid again, I envisioned a future where all of the boring stuff I and others didn’t want to do, could be automated and significantly improved.

I immediately got excited and imagined a different life where profits weren’t the only thing on my mind ALL the time.

I could actually geek around and poke the world, making it even an incredibly tiny bit more to my liking.

I picked up a book, and realized I knew absolutely nothing about anything, and no skills were transferable.

In addition—my math skills were barely beyond elementary.

If I was to truly understand AI, I needed to grasp the algorithms and principles powering these technologies. That meant confronting my biggest limitation: math.

Back to Basics

Determined, I plunged into a rigorous self-study regimen. In my math roadmap article, I’ll be noting (and regularly updating) my approach with a log of all the changes I made along the way. I also wrote a bit about how I approach self-learning, if you wanna check that out.

I tackled calculus head-on, often finding myself perplexed by concepts that seemed designed to confuse me.

From the perceptron model in machine learning to gradient descent, every new topic was a reminder of how much I still had to learn.

Yet, each new challenge excites me!