To be specific, I would quit the other 73 income streams and stop any extracurricular activities until I shipped something. Even though AI feels overhyped (it sort of is), we're still early in the game, and there's plenty of money to be made. Businesses still have a ton of time-consuming, expensive pain points. You just have to pick an industry and go talk to insiders to figure out what to build.

I’m in business technology consulting. You’re right about tons of pain points and opportunity.

But the limiting factor is not AI or any kind of tech, it’s getting these businesses to trust you with fitting into their existing systems and giving you their time.

100%. Another reason to start by talking to customers. The product has to be more than useful—it has to fit into their current workflow. Most B2B startups underinvest in sales (which is not the same as sending 100,000 cold emails).

I won't argue if I had a bunch of other activities consuming most of my bandwidth that weren't bringing in any money. If you really need cash though, I might consider lower risk, lower reward options on at least a part-time basis as well though. Doing a startup isn't exactly a high ROI activity in general--especially in a max-hype area.

Very true—for a software developer, part-time consulting is probably the quickest path to making some money. It's a lower-risk, but much lower-leverage option than a 0-1 startup. Building a startup has a high risk of going to zero, but if you've chosen the right customer, the potential upside is dramatically higher than any other option.