AG #001: I Lost Everything Fighting AI - Then It Saved My Business

AG #001: I Lost Everything Fighting AI - Then It Saved My Business

She built a $3.5M copywriting business, watched it collapse, and spent two years refusing to touch AI. Here's what changed.

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Anti-Generic with Anna Powers, host Anna Powers shares the most transparent story she's ever told - how her $750K projected launch brought in just $100K, why she stubbornly resisted AI for two years, and the rock-bottom moment that forced her to reconsider everything. You'll learn why fear-based resistance is more dangerous than disruption itself, how to embrace AI without losing your voice, and why mastering AI is today's greatest business opportunity.

Question of the Day

Have you been resisting AI in your business? What's holding you back - and what would change if you stopped fighting it? Drop a comment below.

Key Take-aways

• Fear-based resistance to change is more dangerous than the disruption itself
• A "successful" $100K launch can lose money once you factor in real costs
• Stubbornly ignoring market shifts for 18 months nearly ended a decade-long business
• AI is today's version of the copywriting opportunity that built careers a decade ago
• Human-first, AI-amplified: the input always matters more than the output

Timestamped Outline

0:00 Welcome to The Anti-Generic
0:21 Why this first episode matters
1:23 My most embarrassing failure
1:57 Building an audience since 2016
2:28 When ChatGPT changed everything
3:07 Two back-to-back six-figure launches
3:38 Planning a $750K launch as a new mom
4:11 The launch brings in just $100K
4:24 Breaking down the real cost of that "success"
5:13 New baby, lost money, and hundreds of thousands in missing revenue
5:52 The market had shifted radically
6:56 Still refusing to use AI
7:25 Testing new offers for 18 months - nothing was hitting
7:47 Quitting social media and losing 50% of subscribers
8:37 Hitting rock bottom - looking for jobs
9:43 The salary shock that opened my eyes
10:54 I failed to adapt - and I owe you an apology
11:53 My real reason for resisting AI: fear
12:46 The turning point - 18 months of banging my head against a wall
13:56 Surrendering stubbornness and mastering AI
14:37 AI is today's version of the copywriting opportunity
15:09 What happens when you master AI the right way
16:19 AI is the generational opportunity in front of all of us
17:00 Human-first, AI-amplified
17:51 The fork in the road - which way will you go?
18:43 Come on this journey with me
19:03 See you next week

Links & Resources

• Subscribe to The Anti-Generic with Anna Powers - https://www.saraannapowers.com/anti-generic
• Contact Anna - anna@saraannapowers.com

Connect & CTA

Subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Join business owners who get Anna's weekly dispatches on using AI to scale your voice, your reach, and your revenue - without losing what makes you distinct: https://www.saraannapowers.com/anti-generic

Credits

Host: Anna Powers © 2026 Sara Anna Powers. All rights reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, it's Anna Powers, and you are listening to the Amplifier Podcast. And specifically, I'm talking about AI as an amplifier, not as a replacement for who you are, but as an amplifier of your neat, your unique perspective, your worldviews, and all the things that makes your work important and valuable in the marketplace. So this is a really transparent share. I'm going to be putting out a new podcast every single week, a new video every week. And this first one is really important because this sets the stage for you understanding how I ended up, where I ended up, and because that's the perspective from which I'm going to be sharing with you about AI, about forging your way as a small business owner in the age of AI, and about all the things that you need to be on the lookout for in this, I'll just go ahead and say it, this new economy, and how you can continue to differentiate yourself so that your work continues to stand out and continues to hold the same or even more value for your clients and customers as you move forward in this quote post-AI age. So I am gonna share what I wrote for you. I'm gonna share it here and please give me grace here because a lot of the things I'm sharing are really transparent and vulnerable. So I will just dig in. This is my most embarrassing failure that I'm gonna tell you about. And I never thought I would admit this, but here we are because it's time that we start being more transparent with each other and especially those of us, I started my business in 2015. So those of us who've been in business for over a decade, I think it's really important that we show up as leaders and that we're open and transparent with our audiences as far as how our journey has unfolded and how we can actually serve as guides and mentors into the future. Since 2016, I have been building an audience of business owners who are interested in copywriting and messaging. I've tried for many years to serve my audience with integrity, which is one of the core values of my business. So when AI, which has been around since the 1950s but was mostly used by engineers and data scientists and researchers, when AI became accessible widely to the general population in 2022, I faced a fork in the road. And this will be relevant to you, which you'll see shortly. My million-dollar offer at the time was a program called the Clickworthy Copywriting Certification that taught professionals how to become copywriters. Now, I personally started studying copywriting when I was a full-time attorney, and I built my copywriting business to six figures on the side of a very demanding day job. So I knew firsthand the opportunity that the profession provided. But then in the fall of 2022, Chat GPT became widely accessible. Interestingly, timing-wise, this was right after our first multiple six-figure launch of the certification program, and right before our second multiple six-figure launch of the program, which was in January of 2023. So while I was a little bit concerned about AI, the advent of the widespread accessibility of Chat GPT did not dampen my company's sales or our client success in 2022 or 2023. Right before my 43rd birthday, because I guess I love to do really important things later than some people would expect, I had my daughter Sarah in March of 2023. And so I wanted to give myself a little time to be a new mom, to adjust to motherhood. So I planned my next big launch of the certification program for February 2024. We had at this point in our company excellent data from past launches. And based on that data, the launch, the February 2024 launch, was predicted to bring in around $750,000. More than 5,000 people signed up for the launch. I served my heart out for nearly three weeks teaching for free everything I knew about copywriting in 12 plus hours of live teaching before we opened the program for enrollment. When the doors closed four days later, our launch revenue totaled just over 100K. This was at the time absolutely devastating for me. In retrospect, spending $53,000 on ads and making more than $100,000 sounds like math that would work, right? But when you consider the fact that I had 30 affiliates who altogether made fewer than five sales, that I paid an affiliate manager five figures to support those affiliates, that the fees for our ads manager in the six months leading up to the launch and for the launch itself, not the ads cost, like just her fees were more than $40,000, and that the ads themselves also cost an additional $53,000, and that the ads only brought in a tiny portion of our sales, and the vast majority of sales were brought in from organic traffic. People who were either already on my list or already following me on social media before I even started promoting this launch. It starts to, when you think about all those facts together, it starts to make sense how shockingly bad this launch was for my company. So now I had a new baby less than a year old and a launch that lost money after ad fees, my ad manager's fees, the affiliate manager's payment, affiliate compensation payments, and our team salaries. This meant that my company had to make up hundreds of thousands of dollars in projected revenue all while I was still nursing an infant and adjusting to being a new mom at the age of 43. Beyond that, though, and this is the really important part for you, it was an indicator to me that during the year following my daughter's birth, the market had shifted radically. Now I try to reason with myself that maybe this was just a fluke. Perhaps we just ran traffic to the wrong audience, or maybe even my energy was different in some way and not as compelling to clients because obviously I was figuring out a lot with having a new baby. So throughout 2024, I tried a lot of testing of abridged smaller versions of our certification offer at lower price points. And I saw a little traction here or there, but no large scale momentum. I continued to support my clients in building copywriting businesses, but I could see that the opportunities to sign up premium clients as brand new copywriters, those were thinning out. It just wasn't the same market that it was when I started writing copy back at the end of 2016 and could very quickly make 3K a month or 5K a month or 10K a month, even if you were just decent at what you did and met your deadlines on time. Still, I put my foot down about AI, obstinately believing that real writers who used it were selling out and outright resenting it for disrupting the trajectory of my business and the ease with which my clients had previously been able to build lucrative copywriting careers. In 2025, I watched the market shift even further towards scale and automation while I continued to teach my clients pure copywriting skills with no AI intervention. Throughout 2025, I tested several different offers in messaging, general online business building, and even a full program on how to build out a certification. Nothing was hitting. It was like this critical ingredient was missing. And in the midst of all of this struggle, understandably, I quit showing up on social media. I still emailed my list, but I quit adding to my list. In fact, while my list was around 20,000 subscribers strong in early 2024, at the time that I created this message and wrote all this down to share with you, I had 6,552 subscribers. So that's more than a 50% drop in quite a short period of time. Now there is a silver lining there because those subscribers that I have left are still very active and I now have a 60% plus open rate for every single email, which is great, well above industry average. But my point in sharing this is that things were shifting so fast, and I was trying to adapt, but I was trying to adapt while obstinately refusing to use AI. For 18 months, it felt like all the skills I had built leading my business for 10 plus years no longer mattered. So I reached the nadir for a business owner, that is, and I began looking for jobs. Now, I have always told my clients that in the beginning, when you're building a business, there is no shame in having a day job. And I don't believe that there is shame in having a job, but I do believe that some of us are cut out to build something for ourselves and also to provide jobs for other people. And that's what I have been doing for all these years. So for me to get to a point where I felt like I just need to start looking for a place where I can just go and use my talents and skills for someone else, that's a huge shift. Um, so I made it through four interviews for a role as an in-house legal counsel at a very reputable, very large organization, only to find out that the salary was less than my starting salary as a brand new associate at my very first law firm 16 years ago with no experience. This was a low that I debated about even sharing with you because obviously it's um it's it's a lot to admit as a business owner that you considered giving that up and going back to work for a job. But when I got to that point after four interviews and realized how little being an employee in my original field, uh being an attorney, is considered worth now. I knew, whoa, things have shifted even more than I thought that they have shifted. And I'm sharing this because I believe that this will be helpful because I'm betting that you may have experienced your own low over the last few years. It probably wasn't the same exact low as mine, but we all hit lows, and I think it's really healthy for us to share them so that we all know we're not alone. And there are a lot more thoughts I have to share around today's working environment, but I will close this very embarrassing chapter out by sharing that with the disappointment of the shockingly low salary offered for a senior-level legal counsel role, my eyes were open to the fact that the entire landscape of business had changed around me while I was adopting, adapting to being a new mom. And I had just quite simply failed to adapt. And for that, I owe you an apology because you have trusted me to bring you the best wisdom and the best guidance around messaging in business for more than 10 years. And the truth is, and this is the embarrassing thing that I'm that I'm sharing with you, I let my fear hold me back from evolving. I tried to convince myself in the beginning that it was wisdom and not to learn AI, that it was actually really smart and very human first not to learn AI, because surely it would be heavily regulated. Three and a half years later, it still hasn't been. If anything, I see government pushing the use of and adoption of AI. But the real reason that I didn't embrace it, it wasn't because I was so wise. Um, it wasn't because I was so human-centric, it was because I was scared. And that is my most embarrassing failure. Ignoring something so imperative for growth in business just because I was scared. I resisted AI because I felt like it was destroying everything that I had built. I let myself put bitterness and resentment ahead of possibility and adaptation and growth. And maybe you've been in a similar situation where your world has also been upended by AI. Maybe you still fear that it's going to steal your livelihood and destroy your business. If you have felt like that, I promise you are not alone because I was right there with you for several years, feeling like a fraud because things were changing so quickly, and I wanted them to stay the same so badly. I was talking with a colleague who compared AI disrupting the marketplace to an asteroid hitting Earth. So I would say after I survived that first hit, I did not want to go anywhere near the asteroid. I wanted to pretend that it did not exist. And I ignored it until it was unignorable. My big turning point with AI came after 18 months of metaphorically banging my head against a wall to test out different offers that might support my clients. Because after testing all those different offers, that is when I realized that even if I fully left the niche of copywriting, I would still need to understand and implement AI to truly serve my clients at the highest level. And that's when I had to ask myself a very important question, which is what was I really tied to? Was my true mission in my business to teach copywriting? Or was my true mission in business to help small business owners navigate the uncertainty of the world, to identify the opportunities in front of them, and to build meaningful livelihoods by tapping into those opportunities? And when I sat with that question, for me, I realized my true mission is absolutely unequivocally the latter. Copywriting was a vehicle that allowed me to serve my clients for many years. But in the end, what I'm deeply passionate about is helping people who know they have potential to succeed in business hit revenue, profit, and lifestyle goals so that the that the average employee would see as completely unattainable. So my goal is to help you build a business that probably your next door neighbor, probably a lot of your family, family members like wouldn't even dream is possible because I've seen what is possible to build and what you want to build is possible, but it's a completely different mindset. And a big part of that mindset is adapting and really being willing to go first in the marketplace. So I am firmly committed to helping people like you take your talent and multiply it and monetize it online. Once I got clear on my mission, I finally surrendered my stubbornness and decided that I would put my full effort into mastering the thing I had been so afraid of. And as so often happens when we face our fears, as I dug into prompting and building projects and setting up automations throughout various AI tools, I realized that my fear had robbed me and you of nearly two years of forward momentum. And that ends today. What you need to know is that I am fully committed to mastering the ethical use of AI in business and bringing you the most current and impactful ways to incorporate AI into your business without losing your distinctive voice and authenticity. Because just like copywriting was the most successful way you could easily build 5K or even 10K months back when I got started, mastering AI is the quickest way you can grow a profitable business today. AI is today's version of the opportunity that copywriting was years ago when I got started. It is a skill that all successful business owners must master, just like copywriting. And it's something that is easy to master when you have access to the right skills, the tools, and the principles. It is also something that if you decide not to master it, or if you try to learn it in a piecemeal way, like grabbing random prompts from YouTube or listening to various creators on social media and trying to figure it all out without a clear roadmap, it can keep you stuck for many, many years. AI is the present and it's going to be present in all of our futures. It is the generational opportunity that is in front of all of us. In the weeks to come, I'm going to be talking a lot about AI as an amplifier. Like a physical amp that a musician uses, the input matters more than the output. And that's where I can bring you the deepest level of support. Because in order to get excellent quality output from these new tools, you still have to understand the structure of high-converting copywriting. And beyond that, you have to actually own your point of view, your perspective, and your beliefs so that you are infusing anything you put into AI with your distinctive human voice. My approach is and will always remain human first, AI amplified. My promise to you is when you harness the power of AI correctly, you will become anti-generic. While everyone else is starting to sound exactly the same, your voice will cut through the noise. And this weekly message is and will always be 100% written by me, the human, Anna Powers Not Touched by AI. So you always get thoughts and perspectives that are filtered through the lens of humanity and the belief that business is ultimately about relationships and deciding what you have to offer someone that will make a positive difference in their life. The reality is that AI is the opportunity in front of all of us today, and each of us is standing at a fork in the road right now. You can look left to where things have been and wish for the way that they were. You can look right and go that way to navigate a future that is uncertain, but is certainly going to involve in some way, shape, or form AI. So if you're ready to go left, I wish you all the best. This is where we part ways. But if you're ready to go right with me, let me know here and drop a comment or email me. It's Anna at Sarah Anna Powers.com. Let me know because I'm seeing some things that I think could benefit you in a big way. And this is what I'm going to be sharing about in the common weeks, uh, in the coming weeks, where the opportunities lie right now, as well as where the pitfalls are that you are going to need to avoid, want to avoid, so that you don't make the same mistakes that I've made. If you're ready to come with me on this journey, just reach out, Anna at Sarah AnnaPowers.com. Let me know that you heard this message, saw this video, and that you're in for the journey, ready to embrace AI, and that with joyful commitment to future possibilities, we are going to figure this out together. I've got several new interesting ideas to share with you next week. So I will be back with another message then. And until then, I am wishing you all the best success.