The Tool Graveyard

I have a confession: I’ve bought a lot of tools I don’t use anymore. Not because I’m careless with money. Because when you’re trying to figure out AI as a solopreneur, everything promises to be the answer. And for a while, I said yes to a lot of those promises.

There was the all-in-one AI platform — the one that swore it could do everything, all in one place. Content, scheduling, captions, strategy, all under one login. It sounded like the dream: stop juggling five tools, use one. So I signed up.

And within a few sessions, it was obvious. “Everything” meant a thin, watered-down version of tools that already existed and already did each of those things better. It didn’t cost me much money, but it cost me time — time I spent testing something that was never going to replace what I already had.

Then there was the standalone platform built to do one specific job really well. You’d upload something — a podcast, a recording, whatever — and it would spin out content from it: social posts, summaries, all sorts of pieces. I paid for that one for over a year. It genuinely did its job.

But about three months ago, I connected an MCP in Claude and realized, in about five minutes, that Claude could do the exact same thing. I’d been paying for a job my other tool was already capable of doing. That one cost me several hundred dollars I didn’t need to spend.

“I just hadn’t gotten clear yet on what I actually needed before I went looking for something to do it.”

Neither of those tools was a scam. Neither one lied to me.

That’s the whole reason “clarity before tools” became my thing. Not because tools are bad — because buying first and figuring it out later is an expensive way to learn what you could have known from the start.

And to be fair — I probably test more tools than most people ever will, because I’m curious, and because you’re trusting me to be the one who tries it first so you don’t have to.

I still catch myself doing it sometimes. The pull toward the next shiny thing doesn’t fully go away. But I’ve gotten better at asking the question first: what do I actually need this to do, before I hand over my card number to find out.