Back in 2012, the year I left banking, I had a choice: build a lifestyle business or build a venture-backed company.
I chose the lifestyle business. After 13 years in equities I was burned out and just wanted to be free to enjoy the FIRE lifestyle. Writing and tinkering 15 to 20 hours a week for intellectual stimulation beat grinding 15+ hours a day for years for the slim chance of a big exit worth eight figures down the road.
For a long time that looked like the right choice. Ride the bull market. Go on an adventure. Explore new challenges. The thing is, I still learned plenty about scaling a business like a VC-backed company, just in the level and effort I wanted.
Seventeen years later, I may have accidentally built one thing that matters for surviving in the AI economy. Not a product. Distribution.
Thought AI Was Going To Permanently Crush This Site
For all of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, I was feeling the end was near for Financial Samurai.
AI was scraping my content and serving it up with no attribution. Search behavior was changing. Why click through to a 1,500-word post when a chatbot summarizes it in three bullets? I told my dad, “Well, it was fun while it lasted.” He lamented with me.
Financial Samurai is the kind of lifestyle business AI threatens directly. A legacy site that wasn’t built by AI and mostly dependent on organic search for growth. A sitting duck. Heck, even Google is cannibalizing its own legacy search business by revamping its search box with its AI tool, Gemini.
However, eventually, I finally became an AI maximalist. Instead of fearing it, I started investing in it aggressively starting in early 2023. Traditional venture capital, public venture capital, and individual checks into AI founders here in San Francisco. Once you have skin in the game, the fear turns into curiosity.
And somewhere in there, the cloud lifted. I realized Financial Samurai has the four things AI can’t scrape: authority, longevity, trust, and distribution.
Building Is Free Now. Distribution Is More Expensive Than Ever.
Here’s what AI actually did. It didn’t kill content. It killed the cost of building.
Anyone can ship a product now. Spend a weekend with Claude Code and you’ll have a real app. The barrier to building, which used to feel difficult, is basically gone.
But here’s the part nobody warns you about: the barrier to getting users was never the same barrier. The two weren’t always connected. You just couldn’t tell, because they both used to feel impossible at the same time.
I saw a Reddit post recently that nailed it. A guy built four iOS apps with Claude, five more in progress. Real apps. SwiftUI, StoreKit, widgets, the works. Total revenue across all of them? Zero. Total users? His wife, and one guy in Finland he suspects downloaded it by accident. Read this:
Building was not his problem. Demand was. And demand has never been more competitive. You can create something brilliant, but if nobody knows it exists, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby with a server bill.
This is the great inversion of the AI era. The thing that used to be hard, building, is now easy. The thing that was discounted, distribution, is now a huge part of the game. And distribution is exactly what can’t be vibe-coded in a weekend. It takes years.
Why People Actually Read Financial Samurai
So why do hundreds of thousands of people still show up here every month, in a world drowning in AI-generated finance content and TikTok videos?
A few reasons, and none of them are accidental.
Everything here comes from first-hand experience. I’m not summarizing a study I skimmed. I’m telling you what actually happened when I engineered my own layoff in 2012, or how I got screwed by a life insurance company that tried to jack my term premium from $39 to $720 a month just because I’d visited a sleep center. The wins and the mistakes, both.
I spent 10 years in finance before I wrote a word here, so I’m not learning personal finance in public. I lived it and continue to live it.
In 2009, I kickstarted the modern-day FIRE movement and have gone deep into investing topics to help folks build enough passive income to break free from jobs they hate.
I don’t need the income. That means I can be more objective and write whatever the heck I want. Being free to speak freely is wonderful. Please don’t cross me.
And I’ve shown up three times a week for 17 years without fail. That’s over 2,600 articles so far. Trust isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s a deposit you make every week for almost two decades, and you can’t fake the balance.
That is the moat. Not the writing itself. The relationship behind it.
Which Is Exactly Why I Invest In Founders
Here’s where it gets interesting, and why I’m writing this now.
I’m an LP in venture funds and an active angel investor in AI startups. The longer I do this (since 2006), the more convinced I am that I can add tremendous value to early-stage startups through my platform. Not only can I interview founders on my podcast to tell their story, I can also write about their product and help them gain recognition and customers. Money is the most commoditized thing in Silicon Valley. Everybody has money.
What founders can’t easily access is distribution. Trust with a real audience. Seventeen years of pattern recognition on what makes people actually buy a product and stick with it, not just sign up for a free trial.
That’s what I bring. When I back a founder, I’m not wiring money and disappearing, unless you want me to. I can put your product in front of a large, affluent, high-intent audience that has trusted me for almost two decades. I understand customer acquisition, retention, and storytelling.
The best founders are expert builders. They have that handled. They need someone who can solve the problem that actually kills most startups: nobody comes.
So if you’re building something genuinely great and you’re staring down that exact problem, I’m probably the most useful check on your cap table.
You Can’t Fail If You Never Quit
I’ll leave the founders with the one lesson 17 years has beaten into me.
When I started Financial Samurai in 2009, I promised myself I’d publish three times a week for 10 years. I hit that goal in July 2019, and then, like Forrest Gump, I just kept running. “Why stop if I can keep going?” became the mantra.
99% of the personal finance sites that launched around when I did have shut down or sold. I’m still here. Not because I’m smarter, but because I refused to quit. Besides, who sells their baby if they aren’t doing it for the money? Nobody. Please say in the game long enough for compounding rewards to form.
You can never lose if you never give up. Keep finding away around the inevitable walls that form along your journey.
Thank You For 17 Years So Far
Distribution is just consistency plus time. There’s no shortcut, which is exactly why it’s worth so much, and why you should stop delaying and start today.
As I close out my 17th year and head into my 18th this July 2026, thank you. For reading, for sharing, for the perspectives you leave in the comments, and for picking up my books.
The entrepreneur’s journey is full of ups and downs. The trick isn’t avoiding them. It’s accepting them and appreciating every moment along the way.
And to the founders reading this who think I’d be of use, feel free to e-mail me. You can find my e-mail address at the bottom of my About page.
How long have you been a reader of Financial Samurai? Are you a small business owner yourself? If so, how has the journey been?
If you want to achieve financial freedom sooner, subscribe to my free weekly newsletter and join 60,000+ readers. I launched Financial Samurai in 2009 and helped kickstart the modern-day FIRE movement. Everything is written based on firsthand experience, because money is too important to be left to pontification.
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