My 7-year old and I have been building an AI stuffed panda together since the spring. Along the way he picked up one of the most important lessons about doing hard things. The plan sounded kinda simple in my head. Buy a stuffed panda and a Raspberry Pi. Get the hardware. Write the software. Give it an AI voice... a brain... skills. And well... to him I'm Daddy and I can do almost anything... soooooo He thought it would be an overnight thing. Honestly, I underestimated it too. The big wall was getting the "brain" off my computer and into a device small enough to fit inside the panda. That took months. Then last Sunday morning, sitting at my computer together, we finally cracked it. I used that moment to explain something to him. It's rarely a straight line from point A to point B. You go straight. You hit a blocker. You learn something and change direction. You go straight again. You think you're good. You hit another blocker. Off in a new direction. That's the zig zag. The key is to stop and ask yourself one question: "What did I learn from this?" That answer is what pushes you forward. I'm always living this with my LeadCapture too.. I have been for 7 years. If your path looks zig zaggy right now, I think you're on the right one. Most people are scared of the hard, zig zaggy path. But that's where the growth is.

If you convince yourself you’re always on the 1-yard line, it becomes a lot harder to quit. Because who gives up when they’re one yard away? That’s more or less how I’ve approached LeadCapture for the last six years. Through some pretty ridiculous highs, lows, mistakes, and circumstances, I’ve always tried to believe that the next breakthrough could be right there. And right now, with what’s happening around AI... I’m starting to feel like a lot of those years of just pushing forward were leading to this moment. I want to do something a bit different and share my thoughts on what I think ultimately drives success. Because I've been pretty reflective lately. But first, to take things back for some context. I built the earliest versions of LeadCapture in late 2019... as basically just a form builder. It didn't even have a UI for editing forms. I was literally waking up at 4am building forms in JSON for customers and uploading them to a server. Not exactly fun when an agency came through requesting 1,000 forms. But at the time, you couldn't vibe code your way to full 'software products'... you actually had to code. Times were different. Fast forward to today and I feel that we've entered a completely different paradigm in funnel and landing page building. The future is using agents to automate workflows around building and setting up landing pages, funnels, and surveys. Heading into 2026,I bet on this being internal agents that are owned and operated by the platform (like our Copilot feature)... I was kind of wrong. ... and while that's still part of it, I've only come to realize it's one part of the workflow. The real future that's unfolding before our eyes is external agents come in with their own context, get us 80-90% of the way there, then we do the work from there. And that's the part that has me thinking. As the guy sitting in a dimly lit room in 2019, cursing at myself for creating a business where I had to build forms by hand while also trying to survive life with a newborn and a full-time job...

Try this before you hit publish on your next campaign or landing page. (Or when dealing with a huge decision) Go to sleep. 💤💤💤 Literally just stick the idea in the back of your mind and just sleep. Example: I spent a couple of days working on a new home page…. But went to sleep before hitting publish. I purposely wanted to keep an open loop just in case a better idea came to me. I woke up with a little voice saying… “you have a visual platform, but you’re not showing visuals enough”… And that voice was right. That voice sent sent me down a rabbit hole that resulted in a fresh idea that I haven’t tried before. It might suck, but it’s better than what we had before. The mind has a funny way of working on things in the background. I call these 'mental background tasks'... There’s a whole book about it. psycho cybernetics… worth a read.

For anyone running lead gen on GHL (either forms and funnels) here's a good example of the lift that you can see just by switching to LeadCapture

Just wanted to share this for those of you who missed it: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251203862027/en/QuinStreet-Announces-Agreement-to-Acquire-HomeBuddy According to what I read, HomeBuddy was acquired for $115M cash at closing plus another $75M in post-closing payments. They were doing roughly $141M in revenue. Sure, there are deeper details behind the scenes, but that’s not the point. The real story is what this means for the everyday lead generator. The barrier to building a HomeBuddy-style business (in any vertical) is dropping fast. With all of the tools and tech out there. 1-5 person teams can build a business at this scale and I'm sure we'll see more small teams getting exits like this in the near future.