Me, My Customer, and AI by Henrik Werdelin The New Rules of Entrepreneurship
What's it about?
Me, My Customer, and AI (2025) explores how entrepreneurs can harness artificial intelligence to experiment faster, reduce barriers to entry, and build more customer-focused businesses. It shows how AI can act as a co-pilot for founders, supporting innovation while leaving space for the human qualities of empathy and insight. With practical frameworks and exercises, it helps translate AI’s potential into sustainable competitive advantage.
Have you ever had an idea you just couldn’t shake? Maybe it was frustration in your own life that made you think, someone should really fix this. More than half of adults surveyed say they’ve had such an idea – but very few take the leap. For decades, entrepreneurship seemed reserved for a small circle of risk-takers with capital, connections, and sleepless nights to spare.
That reality is shifting fast. Artificial intelligence has lowered the barriers to entry, letting you test ideas, build prototypes, and reach customers in ways once out of reach. But while AI makes it easier to start, it also creates more competition and more pressure to stand out. This means that what separates lasting ventures is no longer technology alone, but how you use your experience, energy, and empathy, all in order to build something that matters.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to uncover your entrepreneurial focus, define the right customers to serve, and identify their real problems. By the end, you’ll be ready to use AI as your entrepreneurial co-pilot to move faster while staying authentic – and build the business idea of your dreams.
Let’s get started.
Every business looks for an edge that creates momentum. Technology, talent, and resources can help, but in an AI-shaped marketplace where those advantages are widely available, they don’t guarantee lasting success. What stands out today is relationship capital – the advantage built from deep, authentic ties with your customers. It’s the trust, reciprocity, and sense of belonging that makes them choose you again and again, even when alternatives abound.
But here’s the thing, though – relationship capital isn’t transactional. Transactions are one-way – but relationships involve give-and-take, and it grows when customers feel heard, understood, and connected to your business.
There are two things to consider when trying to increase your relationship capital: intimacy and status. Intimacy means understanding customers so well they feel you anticipate needs before they ask. You might use feedback loops, data, or AI to personalize, but the core is empathy and attention to detail.
It also shows in shared language and humor – when a joke lands, alignment strengthens. It extends to community: if your customers could meet and immediately find common ground because of you, that’s intimacy at work. Likewise, it turns customers into participants in a larger whole, creating belonging that makes your brand harder to leave.
Status is what being your customer says about someone. Does buying from you help them fit into a valued group, or stand out meaningfully? Some brands confer belonging to a cause or lifestyle. Others provide prestige that signals distinction. Done well, status elevates the relationship beyond simple utility to become part of identity.
The payoff is powerful. Businesses rich in relationship capital move faster because customers trust them through early missteps, spend less because loyalty lowers acquisition costs, and stay more resilient because the brand becomes part of who customers are. In a marketplace where AI levels the field, this is the advantage that endures.
In the next section, you’ll see how the right entrepreneurial skills make those connections even stronger.
It should probably come as no surprise that artificial intelligence is reshaping work on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of people expected to shift careers because of automation. That disruption opens the door to a new way of thinking about entrepreneurship. Instead of being reserved for a well-connected few, building a business is now an option for anyone with an idea and the willingness to serve a customer. What really matters is how you use AI to amplify the traits that have always defined enterprising people. But what are these traits – and how do you harness them?
Well, first, there’s resourcefulness. This has always separated successful founders from everyone else. While productivity gets tasks done, resourcefulness figures out which tasks matter – and how to do them in inventive ways. AI functions as the ultimate multiplier here, helping you unstick projects, break big challenges into small steps, and generate rough drafts you can refine.
Take entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki – he used AI to draft a precise letter to his insurance company. By doing so, he turned an $800 repair into a full payout by communicating his case more clearly than he could have done alone. That is resourcefulness supercharged.
Momentum is equally vital. In the fragile early stages of a business, progress is the oxygen that keeps ideas alive. AI can condense weeks of work – market analysis, pitch decks, landing pages – into days, while also acting as a brainstorming partner that proposes new approaches and accelerates prototyping. It lets founders remain hands-on creators for longer, staying closer to their customers instead of retreating into layers of delegation.
Finally, future focus means spotting the bigger forces shaping what customers will need tomorrow. The most successful entrepreneurs study technology, demographics, regulation, and culture. AI strengthens this skill by helping you process vast amounts of data, identify weak signals, and model potential shifts faster than you could alone. Consider Peloton, which recognized the rise of busy urban professionals willing to spend on health and community. On the other side is Segway, which poured $100 million into a personal transporter that clashed with cultural attitudes and ended up a niche novelty.
Now, it’s important to note that AI won’t replace human imagination entirely. But it sure does magnify your ability to act enterprisingly. When you combine resourcefulness, momentum, and future focus with intelligent tools, you position yourself to spot and seize opportunities others miss.
Coming up, you’ll look at how to direct those skills with clear focus.
Every successful business begins with the energy of its founder. Before customers, investors, or even a finished product, what pushes things forward is the clarity and drive you bring. In a world where AI can automate tasks and accelerate experimentation, the human side – your story, values, and motivation – becomes the real differentiator. Knowing yourself well is the foundation for building something authentic, resilient, and worth people’s trust.
One way to get there is by mapping your entrepreneurial energy across five dimensions: passions, positions, possessions, powers, and potentials. Passions are the problems or causes you can’t stop thinking about. Positions are the roles you’ve held in life and work, each shaping how you lead and connect. Possessions, meanwhile, reveal your priorities through the resources you’ve chosen to gather. Then, powers become your current strengths, and potentials point to what you want to learn next. Together, these five dimensions give you a clear sense of where to focus and what kind of business fits you best.
This reflection directly shapes how you should use AI. By knowing your passions, positions, possessions, powers, and potentials, you can see where your energy is best spent and where technology should step in. If writing and nuance are your strengths, keep the customer-facing words in your own hands and let AI handle early drafts. If your strengths lie elsewhere, lean more heavily on automation to free up energy for what excites you.
To make this practical, build a list of micro-moments – times when you felt at your best, fully engaged, or simply happy. Use these as a filter for new opportunities, asking whether they’re likely to bring more of those moments. Over time, you can shape what you pursue into a personal curriculum, treating each venture as a way to learn and grow.
Sharing what you learn in public strengthens your connection with customers, especially those whose values overlap with yours. That’s why the “About” page is the most visited parts of any website: people want to know who you are and why you do what you do. Be clear about your story, your motivation, and your definition of success. When your venture aligns with who you are, you’ll build a base of loyal customers who believe in it too.
Next up, you’ll learn how to align that focus with the customers who fit you best.
Many startups fail because they never achieve product-market fit, but the real issue often begins earlier – with whether the founder and the customer are a good match. Before any product takes off, there needs to be alignment between what you care about and the people you serve. When that alignment is strong, decisions become easier, communication flows naturally, and you’re far more likely to create something that lasts.
Think of Aaron Patzer, who launched the finance app Mint. As a talented engineer, he was frustrated by his inability to manage personal finances. Instead of ignoring the problem, he built a tool that simplified budgeting and turned it into a daily habit for millions. His lived experience gave him both the motivation to keep going and the perspective to design a product people loved. Within two years, Mint was acquired for $170 million. That is founder-customer fit in action: solving a problem you understand personally – and sharing that solution with others like you.
This kind of fit has clear benefits. It helps you get started quickly, since your first customers are often people you already know and trust. It makes you a better listener, because you speak the same language as your users and pick up nuances outsiders would miss. Not only that, but it improves your communication, as the words that feel natural to you also resonate with your audience. And it keeps you in the game longer, because you genuinely care about the people you’re serving. In an AI-driven world where trust and ethics matter more than ever, that shared experience becomes a powerful differentiator.
If you’re unsure where to begin, track your frustrations for a week and look for patterns. Chances are, problems you face are shared by others. Or think about the issues people already ask you to solve – those repeated requests often point to opportunities where you already have credibility. Once you’ve identified a customer group, sketch out a simple founder-customer fit plan. Define who they are, what they want, and what stands in their way. Then use AI to role-play as those customers to test your assumptions.
When you build from genuine alignment, you’re creating a bond with customers who see you as one of their own. Once you’ve identified the customers who are the best fit for you, the next step is shaping an organization and system that can consistently serve them in ways that scale.
When most people imagine starting a business, they picture building a product. But if you begin with a group of people you want to serve and a problem they urgently want solved, what you end up creating often looks more like a service. That might feel less glamorous, but it’s the right mindset in today’s AI-driven world. Products only have value when they deliver outcomes for customers, and with technology lowering the barriers to creating and distributing them, what matters now is how you design the entire system around the customer experience.
Think about Peloton. On the surface, it sells exercise bikes, but its real value lies in the service system it created: live classes, data tracking, and a sense of community. Customers buy more than a bike – they buy an experience that integrates seamlessly into their goals and lifestyles. This is the difference between a standalone product and an integrated system built in service of the customer.
Designing such systems works best when broken into independent parts that communicate cleanly without depending too heavily on one another. This makes it easier for customers to engage with only what they need, while giving you flexibility to adapt and grow. Scalability then comes from interconnected features reinforcing one another – think Starbucks linking atmosphere, rituals, and rewards programs, or Amazon’s flywheel effect where each improvement fuels the next.
But the real lesson is to avoid obsessing over scalability too soon. Focus on solving first-mile problems by delivering value however you can, even manually at first, and bring in automation only when it strengthens the customer experience.
As your organization grows, the challenge is staying close to customers while building efficiency. Traditional vertical integration – owning every step of the value chain – often drags founders away from their customers. Virtual integration, powered by AI, enables tighter collaboration across companies without creating that drag. Dell showed how this works by selling directly to customers and partnering with specialized manufacturers instead of trying to own everything in-house.
Looking ahead, it’s likely that AI agents will increasingly handle customer interactions and supplier negotiations. This will leave you with more time to focus on vision, relationships, and values. Your role will shift from operator to orchestrator, ensuring that technology amplifies human connection rather than replacing it.
Now, in the final section, you’ll see how AI helps you scale without losing the intimacy that makes customer relationships valuable.
If you’re just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey, closeness with your customers happens by default. You know their names, answer their emails, and jump on calls to solve their problems. But as your business grows, that level of intimacy often fades. AI is changing that equation by making it possible to scale while still maintaining the human connection that builds loyalty and trust.
A good example is Ro, a digital healthcare company founded by CEO Zachariah Reitano after his family faced multiple life-threatening illnesses. The company later expanded into a broad patient-first platform. Ro uses AI to design tailored treatment plans and even create self-service tools like at-home blood kits, but it combines that scale with the empathy of medical professionals. The goal is to make care adapt to patients’ lives.
That same approach can work in your business. AI can help you stay personally involved in customer service far longer than before by taking repetitive tasks off your plate. Instead of handing off support too quickly, you can keep listening to your customers’ frustrations and ideas while letting AI streamline the rest. Those conversations solve problems and deepen your relationship capital.
AI also lets you neighborize your services, so customers feel at home wherever they are. That doesn’t mean creepy personalization, though. Instead, it allows you to maintain a respectful familiarity with your customers. By tuning language, tone, and cultural context, you can make your product feel like it belongs in someone’s neighborhood. On top of that, tools like segmentation, sentiment analysis, and event optimization make communities feel engaged without demanding intrusive amounts of data.
Finally, AI shortens feedback loops. Instead of waiting weeks for survey results or chasing vague satisfaction scores, you can instantly process what customers are saying across multiple channels and identify patterns that matter. Companies already use this to anticipate needs and recommend options before customers even think to ask.
The lesson here is clear: scale doesn’t have to come at the cost of closeness. If you use AI thoughtfully, you can grow faster while strengthening the trust and authenticity that keep customers with you for the long haul. In the end, it’s the combination of intelligent tools and genuine human care that builds businesses built to last.
The main takeaway of this lesson to Me, My Customer, and AI by Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne is that AI lowers barriers and accelerates experimentation, but your lasting advantage comes from pairing intelligent tools with human connection.
By knowing yourself, choosing the right customers, solving real problems, and designing organizations that scale without losing intimacy, you create momentum that competitors can’t easily copy. Success now belongs to those who use AI to amplify empathy and trust. If you build with authenticity and purpose, you can move faster, spend smarter, and grow stronger – while creating a business that customers feel proud to be part of.
Me, My Customer, and AI (2025) explores how entrepreneurs can harness artificial intelligence to experiment faster, reduce barriers to entry, and build more customer-focused businesses. It shows how AI can act as a co-pilot for founders, supporting innovation while leaving space for the human qualities of empathy and insight. With practical frameworks and exercises, it helps translate AI’s potential into sustainable competitive advantage.
Have you ever had an idea you just couldn’t shake? Maybe it was frustration in your own life that made you think, someone should really fix this. More than half of adults surveyed say they’ve had such an idea – but very few take the leap. For decades, entrepreneurship seemed reserved for a small circle of risk-takers with capital, connections, and sleepless nights to spare.
That reality is shifting fast. Artificial intelligence has lowered the barriers to entry, letting you test ideas, build prototypes, and reach customers in ways once out of reach. But while AI makes it easier to start, it also creates more competition and more pressure to stand out. This means that what separates lasting ventures is no longer technology alone, but how you use your experience, energy, and empathy, all in order to build something that matters.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to uncover your entrepreneurial focus, define the right customers to serve, and identify their real problems. By the end, you’ll be ready to use AI as your entrepreneurial co-pilot to move faster while staying authentic – and build the business idea of your dreams.
Let’s get started.
Every business looks for an edge that creates momentum. Technology, talent, and resources can help, but in an AI-shaped marketplace where those advantages are widely available, they don’t guarantee lasting success. What stands out today is relationship capital – the advantage built from deep, authentic ties with your customers. It’s the trust, reciprocity, and sense of belonging that makes them choose you again and again, even when alternatives abound.
But here’s the thing, though – relationship capital isn’t transactional. Transactions are one-way – but relationships involve give-and-take, and it grows when customers feel heard, understood, and connected to your business.
There are two things to consider when trying to increase your relationship capital: intimacy and status. Intimacy means understanding customers so well they feel you anticipate needs before they ask. You might use feedback loops, data, or AI to personalize, but the core is empathy and attention to detail.
It also shows in shared language and humor – when a joke lands, alignment strengthens. It extends to community: if your customers could meet and immediately find common ground because of you, that’s intimacy at work. Likewise, it turns customers into participants in a larger whole, creating belonging that makes your brand harder to leave.
Status is what being your customer says about someone. Does buying from you help them fit into a valued group, or stand out meaningfully? Some brands confer belonging to a cause or lifestyle. Others provide prestige that signals distinction. Done well, status elevates the relationship beyond simple utility to become part of identity.
The payoff is powerful. Businesses rich in relationship capital move faster because customers trust them through early missteps, spend less because loyalty lowers acquisition costs, and stay more resilient because the brand becomes part of who customers are. In a marketplace where AI levels the field, this is the advantage that endures.
In the next section, you’ll see how the right entrepreneurial skills make those connections even stronger.
It should probably come as no surprise that artificial intelligence is reshaping work on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of people expected to shift careers because of automation. That disruption opens the door to a new way of thinking about entrepreneurship. Instead of being reserved for a well-connected few, building a business is now an option for anyone with an idea and the willingness to serve a customer. What really matters is how you use AI to amplify the traits that have always defined enterprising people. But what are these traits – and how do you harness them?
Well, first, there’s resourcefulness. This has always separated successful founders from everyone else. While productivity gets tasks done, resourcefulness figures out which tasks matter – and how to do them in inventive ways. AI functions as the ultimate multiplier here, helping you unstick projects, break big challenges into small steps, and generate rough drafts you can refine.
Take entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki – he used AI to draft a precise letter to his insurance company. By doing so, he turned an $800 repair into a full payout by communicating his case more clearly than he could have done alone. That is resourcefulness supercharged.
Momentum is equally vital. In the fragile early stages of a business, progress is the oxygen that keeps ideas alive. AI can condense weeks of work – market analysis, pitch decks, landing pages – into days, while also acting as a brainstorming partner that proposes new approaches and accelerates prototyping. It lets founders remain hands-on creators for longer, staying closer to their customers instead of retreating into layers of delegation.
Finally, future focus means spotting the bigger forces shaping what customers will need tomorrow. The most successful entrepreneurs study technology, demographics, regulation, and culture. AI strengthens this skill by helping you process vast amounts of data, identify weak signals, and model potential shifts faster than you could alone. Consider Peloton, which recognized the rise of busy urban professionals willing to spend on health and community. On the other side is Segway, which poured $100 million into a personal transporter that clashed with cultural attitudes and ended up a niche novelty.
Now, it’s important to note that AI won’t replace human imagination entirely. But it sure does magnify your ability to act enterprisingly. When you combine resourcefulness, momentum, and future focus with intelligent tools, you position yourself to spot and seize opportunities others miss.
Coming up, you’ll look at how to direct those skills with clear focus.
Every successful business begins with the energy of its founder. Before customers, investors, or even a finished product, what pushes things forward is the clarity and drive you bring. In a world where AI can automate tasks and accelerate experimentation, the human side – your story, values, and motivation – becomes the real differentiator. Knowing yourself well is the foundation for building something authentic, resilient, and worth people’s trust.
One way to get there is by mapping your entrepreneurial energy across five dimensions: passions, positions, possessions, powers, and potentials. Passions are the problems or causes you can’t stop thinking about. Positions are the roles you’ve held in life and work, each shaping how you lead and connect. Possessions, meanwhile, reveal your priorities through the resources you’ve chosen to gather. Then, powers become your current strengths, and potentials point to what you want to learn next. Together, these five dimensions give you a clear sense of where to focus and what kind of business fits you best.
This reflection directly shapes how you should use AI. By knowing your passions, positions, possessions, powers, and potentials, you can see where your energy is best spent and where technology should step in. If writing and nuance are your strengths, keep the customer-facing words in your own hands and let AI handle early drafts. If your strengths lie elsewhere, lean more heavily on automation to free up energy for what excites you.
To make this practical, build a list of micro-moments – times when you felt at your best, fully engaged, or simply happy. Use these as a filter for new opportunities, asking whether they’re likely to bring more of those moments. Over time, you can shape what you pursue into a personal curriculum, treating each venture as a way to learn and grow.
Sharing what you learn in public strengthens your connection with customers, especially those whose values overlap with yours. That’s why the “About” page is the most visited parts of any website: people want to know who you are and why you do what you do. Be clear about your story, your motivation, and your definition of success. When your venture aligns with who you are, you’ll build a base of loyal customers who believe in it too.
Next up, you’ll learn how to align that focus with the customers who fit you best.
Many startups fail because they never achieve product-market fit, but the real issue often begins earlier – with whether the founder and the customer are a good match. Before any product takes off, there needs to be alignment between what you care about and the people you serve. When that alignment is strong, decisions become easier, communication flows naturally, and you’re far more likely to create something that lasts.
Think of Aaron Patzer, who launched the finance app Mint. As a talented engineer, he was frustrated by his inability to manage personal finances. Instead of ignoring the problem, he built a tool that simplified budgeting and turned it into a daily habit for millions. His lived experience gave him both the motivation to keep going and the perspective to design a product people loved. Within two years, Mint was acquired for $170 million. That is founder-customer fit in action: solving a problem you understand personally – and sharing that solution with others like you.
This kind of fit has clear benefits. It helps you get started quickly, since your first customers are often people you already know and trust. It makes you a better listener, because you speak the same language as your users and pick up nuances outsiders would miss. Not only that, but it improves your communication, as the words that feel natural to you also resonate with your audience. And it keeps you in the game longer, because you genuinely care about the people you’re serving. In an AI-driven world where trust and ethics matter more than ever, that shared experience becomes a powerful differentiator.
If you’re unsure where to begin, track your frustrations for a week and look for patterns. Chances are, problems you face are shared by others. Or think about the issues people already ask you to solve – those repeated requests often point to opportunities where you already have credibility. Once you’ve identified a customer group, sketch out a simple founder-customer fit plan. Define who they are, what they want, and what stands in their way. Then use AI to role-play as those customers to test your assumptions.
When you build from genuine alignment, you’re creating a bond with customers who see you as one of their own. Once you’ve identified the customers who are the best fit for you, the next step is shaping an organization and system that can consistently serve them in ways that scale.
When most people imagine starting a business, they picture building a product. But if you begin with a group of people you want to serve and a problem they urgently want solved, what you end up creating often looks more like a service. That might feel less glamorous, but it’s the right mindset in today’s AI-driven world. Products only have value when they deliver outcomes for customers, and with technology lowering the barriers to creating and distributing them, what matters now is how you design the entire system around the customer experience.
Think about Peloton. On the surface, it sells exercise bikes, but its real value lies in the service system it created: live classes, data tracking, and a sense of community. Customers buy more than a bike – they buy an experience that integrates seamlessly into their goals and lifestyles. This is the difference between a standalone product and an integrated system built in service of the customer.
Designing such systems works best when broken into independent parts that communicate cleanly without depending too heavily on one another. This makes it easier for customers to engage with only what they need, while giving you flexibility to adapt and grow. Scalability then comes from interconnected features reinforcing one another – think Starbucks linking atmosphere, rituals, and rewards programs, or Amazon’s flywheel effect where each improvement fuels the next.
But the real lesson is to avoid obsessing over scalability too soon. Focus on solving first-mile problems by delivering value however you can, even manually at first, and bring in automation only when it strengthens the customer experience.
As your organization grows, the challenge is staying close to customers while building efficiency. Traditional vertical integration – owning every step of the value chain – often drags founders away from their customers. Virtual integration, powered by AI, enables tighter collaboration across companies without creating that drag. Dell showed how this works by selling directly to customers and partnering with specialized manufacturers instead of trying to own everything in-house.
Looking ahead, it’s likely that AI agents will increasingly handle customer interactions and supplier negotiations. This will leave you with more time to focus on vision, relationships, and values. Your role will shift from operator to orchestrator, ensuring that technology amplifies human connection rather than replacing it.
Now, in the final section, you’ll see how AI helps you scale without losing the intimacy that makes customer relationships valuable.
If you’re just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey, closeness with your customers happens by default. You know their names, answer their emails, and jump on calls to solve their problems. But as your business grows, that level of intimacy often fades. AI is changing that equation by making it possible to scale while still maintaining the human connection that builds loyalty and trust.
A good example is Ro, a digital healthcare company founded by CEO Zachariah Reitano after his family faced multiple life-threatening illnesses. The company later expanded into a broad patient-first platform. Ro uses AI to design tailored treatment plans and even create self-service tools like at-home blood kits, but it combines that scale with the empathy of medical professionals. The goal is to make care adapt to patients’ lives.
That same approach can work in your business. AI can help you stay personally involved in customer service far longer than before by taking repetitive tasks off your plate. Instead of handing off support too quickly, you can keep listening to your customers’ frustrations and ideas while letting AI streamline the rest. Those conversations solve problems and deepen your relationship capital.
AI also lets you neighborize your services, so customers feel at home wherever they are. That doesn’t mean creepy personalization, though. Instead, it allows you to maintain a respectful familiarity with your customers. By tuning language, tone, and cultural context, you can make your product feel like it belongs in someone’s neighborhood. On top of that, tools like segmentation, sentiment analysis, and event optimization make communities feel engaged without demanding intrusive amounts of data.
Finally, AI shortens feedback loops. Instead of waiting weeks for survey results or chasing vague satisfaction scores, you can instantly process what customers are saying across multiple channels and identify patterns that matter. Companies already use this to anticipate needs and recommend options before customers even think to ask.
The lesson here is clear: scale doesn’t have to come at the cost of closeness. If you use AI thoughtfully, you can grow faster while strengthening the trust and authenticity that keep customers with you for the long haul. In the end, it’s the combination of intelligent tools and genuine human care that builds businesses built to last.
The main takeaway of this lesson to Me, My Customer, and AI by Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne is that AI lowers barriers and accelerates experimentation, but your lasting advantage comes from pairing intelligent tools with human connection.
By knowing yourself, choosing the right customers, solving real problems, and designing organizations that scale without losing intimacy, you create momentum that competitors can’t easily copy. Success now belongs to those who use AI to amplify empathy and trust. If you build with authenticity and purpose, you can move faster, spend smarter, and grow stronger – while creating a business that customers feel proud to be part of.
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