As an entrepreneur, I have a paradoxical feeling these days.

I have sold my first startup after 8 years of struggle. It wasn't a huge success, but financially rewarding to some extent. I'm still in the company I've sold but my brain doesn't stop thinking about next startup ideas.

At the same time, I feel like I don't have any passion. I'm clearly burned out. I don't want to "work" anymore. Especially, I'm not good at working for others. I've lost the ability to function inside a structure I didn't build. Entrepreneurship isn't a choice for me — it's the only mode I know.

The rapid evolution of AI fuels that feeling. It's getting harder to get traction with incomplete but interesting product, because the AI itself is too interesting. It's now almost impossible to attract attention with some kind of small but useful kind of tool, unless you have a large number of audiences.

Every founder I know has felt it at some point: that sinking feeling when Anthropic or OpenAI drops another update. The bar keeps rising. Now you need a unique angle, deep expertise, or obsessive craftsmanship. Get the approach wrong, and no one will care.

What should I do at this point? That's a really tough question.

After a long-time pondering, I found out the reason I get depressed or feel threatened by every update from AI vendors is my interests aren't aligned with AI's progress. Every leap forward is supposed to be good news — but for someone trying to build something meaningful, it mostly feels like the ground shifting beneath your feet.

Then a concept came to me: nowork.

I can build a tool that automates away my own repetitive work. Since I don't want to work, probably I can get motivated to build tools that make my work unnecessary. And the AI models' update improves the tool or make the cost lower.

Back-office automation is actually the natural choice for many founders. The operations were the worst part of running my company for 8 years. Chasing down receipts every month, processing payroll, handling endless administrative tasks — none of it created any value. It was just friction.

The goal of project nowork is simple: build tools that make the worst parts of work disappear.

The first tool I'm building is something that automatically retrieves receipts and invoices from SaaS services. Every month, downloading PDFs from a dozen different portals is a mindless waste of time. Although it's kind of classic product idea with a bunch of incumbents, we should be able to hand that off entirely with the power of AI.

I don't know how the product idea will work out. But this single principle makes me feel much better: align your interests with AI's progress, not against it. If you've felt the same paradox, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it.