Hey there,

In April 2022, I quit my job to pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur.

The last three years have been a whirlwind. I’ve scaled Consistent Character AI to $7k a month, Neolemon to $12k a month, and ArtBrahma to $2k a month.

I’ve also learned more in these three years than I did in the decade before. I made mistakes, corrected them, and became wiser. And I want to share a few lessons I learned along the way with you.

If you’re starting off on your entrepreneurial journey (or thinking about it), this post might help you pursue the right goals, build a profitable business, and not get derailed by false starts and stops.

In a nutshell, the lessons are:

1. Audience first, product second.
2. Education builds trust.
3. Don’t try to do everything yourself.
4. A mentor beats reinventing the wheel.
5. Your health is your competitive advantage.

Let’s dive in.

1. Audience First, Product Second

It’s a good idea to have a trusted doctor and lawyer before you need one. I would add “an audience” to that list.

An audience's feedback helps you recognize what is working and what isn’t. It spreads your message to grow your community and engagement. And when you do launch a product, you don’t have to start selling from scratch. You already have willing customers and advocates.

I made the mistake of not building an audience first. I was too busy developing my applications and courses. By the time I started posting on social media, the platforms were saturated, which meant our growth was slower than what it could have been.

An audience gives your startup a healthy edge. Don’t leave it as an afterthought.

2. Education Builds Trust

Going viral doesn’t build an audience, engaging does.

Chasing viral trends is like being a stock trader who has to offer new tips every day. While it works to an extent, it’s unsustainable in the long term. What people really want (especially outside Wall Street) is long-term value… which comes through education.

When you teach what you know, two things happen:

• You empower people to level up.
• The process of constantly learning and teaching makes you level up.

And the most effective way to do this is to build in public. Post about your successes, failures, and learnings in public.

This builds an engaging audience and enhances your own creativity and learning spirit.

3. Don’t Try to Do Everything Yourself

Yet another mistake that slowed Neolemon’s growth was that I tried to do everything by myself.

Building platforms, creating courses, recording and editing YouTube videos, staying updated with the latest news on AI visuals. I was moving in 10 different directions without sustained focus in any one. At times, I felt so exhausted that I wanted to give everything up and go back to a job.

In reality, I forgot what an entrepreneur’s strength is: resource allocation. Here are a few questions that can help you figure them out:

• How can you allocate resources to do more with less?
• What can you delegate, outsource to hired partners?
• What can you automate using AI tools?

This helps you focus on your core competence and reap compounded returns in the long term.

It may sound counterintuitive, but the sooner you delegate what is outside your circle of expertise, the faster your business will grow.

4. A Mentor Beats Reinventing the Wheel

To allocate your resources well requires sticking to your priorities.

You may know what they are, but knowing is not the same as doing. When you are close to a task, it becomes difficult to do —or even see—what is right. Feedback can remedy this, but taking feedback from just about anyone is equally dangerous. You could get sent down the wrong rabbit hole, and it might take forever to return.

That’s why having a business mentor helps. One who has achieved what you want to achieve, who can see things from an outside perspective, and who can align you with your strengths and priorities.

I’ve created my own ‘virtual board of advisors’ like Daniel Priestly, Alex Hormozi, and Chris Donnelley. I study them methodically and apply their frameworks to my specific challenges. Even without direct access to mentors, this structured approach to learning has helped me avoid countless pitfalls.

Hopefully, I will find a mentor whom I can personally speak to soon 🙂

5. Your Health Is Your Competitive Advantage

For two-and-a-half years as an entrepreneur, I ignored my physical health.

I felt guilty for “wasting time” on exercise and meditation, thinking I had to spend all my time working. This went on until I started getting severe back pain. Back pain?! I’m not even 35 years old!

Caesar Baustista, a software engineer at the VC firm Signal Fire, points out that we are optimizing our lives for the wrong things. We are fixated on marginally improving our efficiency, when in fact, most of our energy should get invested in our physical and mental well-being.

The terrible back pain was a wake-up call for me to get my health back in order. Now I exercise at least twice a week, go surfing in the ocean, meditate regularly, eat healthy food, and stay hydrated. An improved physical health has also done my mood, focus, and overall mental health a world of good.

Powerful words!

These five lessons have transformed my entrepreneurial journey from chaos to clarity. But perhaps the most unexpected insight came recently, as the AI landscape continues to accelerate at breakneck speed.

Bonus: Embrace the Slow Burn

There’s a flood of AI updates every week. New tools, features, ways to create. It’s exciting—until it’s not.

I love experimenting with these tools daily. It helped us build our business and share valuable content with you. But lately, the pace has felt… relentless.

I found myself chasing every ChatGPT drop, every MidJourney upgrade, every new trick making waves on X. And even though that helped me grow this community, it also left me drained.

I’ve realized that I don’t need to test every new AI tool, show up and just ride the wave (although I love surfing in real life), and create content that drains me.

Instead, I’m choosing a slower, more sustainable rhythm—one that brings me joy. That involves building products, solving real problems, and helping creators use AI with intention, not overwhelm.

If you’re feeling this too—burned out by the AI race—know that you’re not alone. Let’s build with calm, not chaos.

If you found these lessons valuable, I’d love to hear which one resonated most with you. Reply to this email or reach out to me on LinkedIn.

My Experiment with ChatGPT 4o Image Generation

In other news, I created five awesome ads using ChatGPT's 4o Image Generation in under nine minutes.

(80% of that time was spent me waiting for the images to generate).

Here is a glimpse of four of them. (One was a refinement of an ad the AI model generated.)

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If you're curious, here is the format of the prompt I used—and you can use too:

For instance here is the prompt for the popcorn ad:

Create image: For a functional popcorn snack (similar to Opopop)
Visual: Popcorn mid-burst with sparkles, superhero comic style
Headline: Popcorn got powers
Subline: Protein-packed. Vitamin-infused. Actually fun.
CTA: Snack with superpowers →

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Go ahead. Try it out. And share the outcome on LinkedIn while tagging me in the post. I am rooting for you 🙂

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Talk soon,

Sachin and Diana.

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