Stop Digging for Gold and Start Selling Shovels
The AI Infrastructure Play Nobody's Talking About
Every gold rush has two types of people: those frantically digging for gold, and those selling shovels to the diggers.
Guess who actually got rich in 1849?
Right now, everyone's racing to build the next ChatGPT killer. They're burning millions on compute, competing with OpenAI's army of PhDs, and fighting over the same crowded space.
Meanwhile, the real money is sitting right there in plain sight.
The shovel sellers are cleaning up.
Think about it: For every company trying to build the next foundation model, there are thousands who just need better tools to use the models that already exist.
They need prompt templates that actually work. Automation workflows that don't break. APIs that don't require a computer science degree to implement.
Here's what the smart money is building:
The infrastructure layer everyone else needs but nobody wants to build themselves. Prompt management platforms. Fine-tuning services that turn months of work into drag-and-drop simplicity. No-code tools that let marketing teams build AI workflows without touching a single line of code.
Community platforms where AI builders actually hang out and solve problems together. Data labeling services that turn messy datasets into training gold. Agent frameworks that work out of the box instead of requiring six months of engineering.
The math is simple:
One foundation model might serve millions of users. But those millions of users need hundreds of different tools, templates, and services to actually do something useful with it.
Every AI company needs customer support. Every AI product needs better onboarding. Every AI team needs workflow automation.
Stop competing with Google's AI budget. Start solving problems Google can't be bothered with.
The companies printing money right now aren't the ones with the fanciest models. They're the ones making AI actually usable for everyone else.
Midjourney didn't build their own image model—they built the best interface for existing models. Zapier didn't create AI—they made it accessible to people who couldn't code.
Your competitive advantage isn't better AI. It's better execution on the boring stuff that makes AI actually work.
While everyone else is digging for gold, the shovels are sitting right there waiting to be built.
The question isn't whether you should pivot. It's whether you're brave enough to stop digging and start building what everyone actually needs.
The gold rush won't last forever.
But the infrastructure that enables it?
That's generational wealth.
Pick up a shovel.
What shovel are you building? Hit reply and tell me—I read every response.