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I’ve always been a tinkerer. If I weren’t, there’s almost no chance I’d be an entrepreneur.
When I released my first product in college, my goal wasn’t to make money — it was to build something for the sake of it. I saw a problem and decided to see if I could create a solution.
Turns out, I could. Not everything I’ve built has worked out the way I wanted it to, but that’s okay. The tinkerer mindset doesn’t require a 100 percent success rate. You might think that my love of experimenting would have been tempered once my business grew. But actually, I’ve only become more firm in my conviction that great things come from those who tinker.
Even better? Recent leaps in AI capabilities have only made tinkering easier. Here’s why.
Related: How to Prepare Your Small Business for the Next Wave of AI Innovation
Why experimentation is essential
If there’s one trait every founder needs, it’s a willingness to experiment. Great products aren’t born fully formed — they’re shaped by trial, error, feedback and iteration.
When I launched Jotform, I wasn’t trying to build a company. I was trying to solve a problem. That curiosity led to our first tagline, “The Easiest Form Builder.” I obsessed over usability and kept tweaking the product until it felt effortless to use. That mindset — build, test, improve — has guided every version since.
I often tell the founders I mentor: You don’t need to get it perfect, you just need to get it in front of people. The feedback you get will tell you what to fix, what to double down on and what to scrap.
My 50/50 rule — spending half your time on product and half on growth — is built on the same principle. You’re constantly experimenting on two fronts: what you’re building and how you’re getting it into users’ hands. It’s a push-pull dynamic that inherently requires trial and error.
Why AI is a tinkerer’s dream
Here’s the thing about tinkering: It doesn’t work under duress.
Today, experimentation is easier and more accessible than ever thanks to AI. In the past, it was extremely difficult to carve out the time and space to be creative, because who has several uninterrupted hours just to play around with a project that may ultimately yield nothing? For me, early mornings and late nights were the golden times for working on my startup, when I didn’t have to focus on my day job or any other obligations nagging for my attention.
For many people, those precious off-hours are still the ticket to unlocking creative thinking. But instead of wasting them on exasperating tasks like debugging code, designing a UI or writing copy from scratch, you can offload those responsibilities to an AI assistant. Want to build a landing page, translate it and generate five headline variations? That’s now a 30-minute exercise, not a full weekend.
That kind of efficiency is a game-changer. It lowers the cost of experimentation, and more importantly, it removes the friction between idea and execution. You can move straight from “what if?” to “let’s find out,” which is exactly what tinkering is all about.
Related: Why Smart Entrepreneurs Let AI Do the Heavy Business Lifting
Amplifying creativity
There’s a misconception that AI will do all the work for you. It won’t. AI, at least not yet, cannot replicate human creativity and ingenuity. What it will do is eliminate the bottlenecks that keep you from doing your best work.
Recently, I returned from an eight-month break from my business. I’d had my third child, and I wanted to take the opportunity to spend time with my family. Once back in the office, I realized I didn’t want to return to the way I’d been working before, getting pulled in several directions at once and being too stretched thin to focus on what I cared about.
Instead, I decided to dramatically limit the areas of my business I would focus on. Recently, that’s meant working with our architect to design a new office space. It’s something I enjoy, but couldn’t fully commit to previously thanks to a pileup of other distractions.
In the past, I might have had to let it go — just because I wanted to be involved didn’t mean I’d have the bandwidth to do it. It was a project that interested me, but didn’t require my participation. That’s the thing about tinkering — most of it isn’t strictly necessary.
Since I’ve returned, I’ve been able to focus on blueprints and layout concepts for uninterrupted stretches of time. How?
One reason is that I have an executive team that has been able to take over many of the day-to-day functions that previously absorbed my attention. The second is because I’ve deputized AI to take on some of my most annoying, time-consuming busywork. For example, I’ve refined my already-effective email filtering technique even further with the help of an AI agent, which autonomously sorts and in some cases, even responds to routine queries so I don’t have to. That means less time fighting the onslaught of emails, more time investing my energy where it counts.
My goal isn’t to have AI figure out window placements for me, make hiring decisions or determine the strategic direction of my company. Instead, it’s to clear my plate of the time-consuming tasks that have distracted me from what I want to do.
For entrepreneurs, AI has afforded us more of the most valuable resource we have: the space to tinker. And in my experience, that’s where everything worthwhile happens.
I’ve always been a tinkerer. If I weren’t, there’s almost no chance I’d be an entrepreneur.
When I released my first product in college, my goal wasn’t to make money — it was to build something for the sake of it. I saw a problem and decided to see if I could create a solution.
Turns out, I could. Not everything I’ve built has worked out the way I wanted it to, but that’s okay. The tinkerer mindset doesn’t require a 100 percent success rate. You might think that my love of experimenting would have been tempered once my business grew. But actually, I’ve only become more firm in my conviction that great things come from those who tinker.
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