The biggest AI agents trap

At Swan AI, we’re building towards $30M ARR with just three founders and a swarm of AI agents.

No employees. No shortcuts. Just intelligent leverage. We call this playbook ‘The Autonomous Business OS’.

And we’re putting our money where our OS is: we spend over $350K a year on AI agents - not because it sounds cool on LinkedIn, but because it works.

But here’s the trap most teams fall into:
They build what they should’ve bought. Or buy what they can’t shape to their edge.

We’ve done both. That’s why we built a simple framework to decide—build vs. buy—and get back to scaling.

Welcome to the Matrix, Neo

The decision comes down to two variables: what you’re solving, and what you’re good at.

So we built a 2x2 matrix to guide every call.

• The X-axis: How unique is the use case to you?

• The Y-axis: How strong is your internal capability to build?

Once you plot where you stand, the decision makes itself.
No endless Slack debates. No expensive experiments.

Just a clear call on where to invest your time.

Start with the X-axis: How unique is this use case to you?

Ask yourself:

• Is this a challenge every company faces—or is it tied to your unique GTM motion?

• Is the logic fixed—or are you constantly iterating, adjusting, evolving?

• Is the data coming from one system—or scattered across five tools and three people?

If the answer is horizontal, stable, simple—you’re looking at a commoditized use case.
If it’s specific, evolving, complex—you’re in unique territory.

And that distinction matters more than you think.

Now for the Y-axis: How capable are you of building this in-house?

Spoiler: being “AI-ready” has nothing to do with AI.

It’s about systems thinking.
Low-code fluency.
Automation muscle.

If your team knows how to ship in Make, n8n, or Zapier - congrats, you’ve got high capability.
If not? That’s okay. Just don’t pretend you do. Buy until you build the muscle.

A smart team that can’t build fast is just a smart bottleneck.
You don’t need to understand AI—you need to understand how your business runs under the hood.

AI Expertise Is Overrated

Don’t have that muscle yet? No problem.

Start small. Don’t overthink it.

Pick one workflow you do every week—manually, painfully, predictably.
Map the input. Define the outcome.
Then rebuild it in Make or n8n.

Forget structure. Forget elegance. Just get it working.

Because in this new era, your unfair advantage won’t come from prompt engineering or fine-tuning LLMs.
It’ll come from knowing when to build, when to buy—and having the muscle to do both.

The best teams in the AI-native era won’t be the ones with fine-tuned models or in-house LLM experts.

They’ll be the ones with no-code reflexes, low-code speed, and an instinct for turning messy ops into clean loops.

Because in this new game, AI isn’t your moat.

Execution is.

You are special, REALLY!

You’ve made it to the end - which means you’re probably one of us.

You’re probably not just curious, you’re a real autonomous builder.

Off the back of our last session, we’re running another Autonomous Builders Roundtable next week.

It’s not a webinar. It’s not a pitch.

Just me and Ido (our CPO), pulling back the curtain on how we’re actually building Swan - what’s working, what’s breaking, and how we’re scaling with agents instead of employees.

Raw process. Real tactics. No slides.

Reply if you want a seat at the table.