Why 2025 Was the First Year I Truly Felt Like I Knew What I Was Doing in Business

The last days of any year have traditionally been a time of reflection, planning, and goal setting for me. This year seems to be a bit different. While the holidays are always busy, for some reason, they are much more busy than they have ever been. Family events, dinners, and social gatherings have been plentiful, and the time I've been able to spend with family members and loved ones has been a great joy. Previous years would leave me reflecting more on what I wanted to do in the new year. Many times I found myself sulking in the lack of substantial progress in my business endeavors and work. But this year is different. Without coming off as arrogant, this year was great.

I made a huge pivot at the start of 2025, which was closing down my info product consulting business and forcing myself to learn a skill that was unsaturated (at the time) and had potential to build interesting & useful tools around. At first, it was vibe coding apps and website landing pages, learning the basics. I'd take screenshots of various landing pages I liked and attempt to recreate them in Cursor, Lovable, or even Bolt. I spent most of January, February, and March focusing on this new and very rapidly advancing field of AI, and I loved it.

Fast forward to April, and the idea of “making money” with this new business was beginning to take shape, at least in my mind anyway. This is where CortexTools was born, and the focus would turn from only building things with vibe coding to building AI automations with Make.com and n8n. I started my agency services and immediately saw huge demand. This would lead me to build the first info product, CortexTools, a Skool community priced at $27/mo that taught people how to build AI automations with n8n and gave them templates they could download and use for themselves.

At this point, the AI niche had started to catch fire and the entire internet was seeming to pivot to this new world of building with AI. To drive growth and acquire customers for the group, we ran Meta ads to Instagram and Facebook and saw massive success: low cost per purchase and a very scalable business model. Competitors in my niche were making upwards of $100K/mo and the industry was booming. As more competitors entered the market, natural competition and thus saturation started to take hold. This is when a pivot from just templates to a full “Client Acquisition System” that people could use to start an AI agency and get clients really started to become the focus.

This would see a huge boost in my income and create, for the first time ever in my 6+ years of “online business,” a feeling of “I know what I’m doing.” I understood everything: client acquisition, media buying, and product development to a point where I could iterate on it and build better things over and over again. Eventually, growth slowed due to a churn problem inside the Skool community, which was due to one simple fact: my courses sucked.

I can build course programs, trainings, and even webinars pretty easily, as I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I finally found myself content with the fact that all my competitors had better products that actually got their members results. This was a sobering realization, but it was a necessary one. I took this and started developing a new Skool community, one that would be polished, refined, and built with the core mission of getting people results and giving as much value as possible. This would be called “AI Department,” and now, as the year closes out, this is my main focus going into 2026. The goal is to scale to 1,000 paid members by the end of 2026. I plan on doing this by combining my paid ads strategy and a new organic content strategy with a heavy emphasis on YouTube video creation. I could sit here and explain this whole complicated and bloated strategy and the software and tools I’m using for it, but that would not be honest. The truth is, it is all just consistency: showing up every day and making, making, making.

I’m excited for the future, I’m more confident than ever, and I’m ready to go after my greater goals for this new year. I cannot neglect to recognize the progress I’ve made this year, as this really was a formative year for my business acumen and the talent to drive growth that I am starting to discover I possess. We will see where the road I’m on takes me, but for the meantime, the path is clear and I know exactly what I need to do.

So, as I finish writing this with the smell of Christmas Eve dinner cooking in my in-laws’ house, I am grateful for a year of long-overdue progress and a confidence in the future of my work and abilities.

Take it easy,

Kyle