Vladimir Druts 💪

Founder. Marketer.

What a man needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. - Victor Frankel

Founder

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5 months ago, I tried agentic coding and walked away unimpressed.

One month ago, I was genuinely stunned!

Today, agents run most of my life and business - coaching me through breakthroughs I couldn't get from years of paid therapy and business coaching.

The scaling laws aren't what matter any more. It's the self-correction. The continuous work time going from minutes to hours to entire days.

And the gap between "people using ChatGPT for recipes" and "people using agents to build businesses" and manage their life, like a digital Chief of Staff, is about to become the only gap that matters.

#ai #agentic #business #entrepreneurship #automation #tech

 Vladimir Druts

⚫ Practical AI adoption for growth teams | Horizin.ai | Fractional CMO | 4x Founder

We are officially past the point of using AI just to write emails or code! 

I've been using AI for my businesses and personal life since the dawn of GPT3.

I am rarely surprised by new tools anymore.

But this week, I started hacking together custom, autonomous agents using a platform called OpenClaw 🦞, and it fundamentally shifted how I view AI.

Like many of you, I have been wanting to put my insights out there, but I kept hitting a wall of friction and perfectionism. 

So, I built a custom Tony Robbins agent. It understands my career context, my business, and my specific mental blocks. It texts me 3x a day.

Yesterday, I told it about my friction. Its response wasn't a generic AI output; it completely dismantled my excuses and gave me the exact executive coaching I needed to hit record.


We are entering the era of synthetic mentorship.

"Perfectionism is just fear wearing a sophisticated costume."

Everyone told you to specialize, but AI just made that the worst career advice of the decade.

I had the opportunity to work alongside Daniel Priestley for 18 months as CMO at Dent Global and I witnessed his uncanny ability to compress complexity into frameworks that feel obvious the second you hear them.

One concept he coined "Rapid Loops" rewired how I think about work:

 → Spot a problem across domains
 → Assemble the right humans and AI tools
 → Solve it fast
 → Scale or hand it over
 → Move to the next loop

Here's what I'm seeing in real time.

Agentic workflows (AI systems that plan, execute, and iterate without hand holding) are collapsing the gap between a small team and an enterprise.

4 people with the right stack now have leverage that used to require 50+.

But that leverage only compounds if someone on the team can move across domains. See the whole board. Solve the problem, hand it off, sprint to the next one.

The industrial age rewarded people who picked a lane and stayed forever.

The agentic age rewards people who never could. 

The ones whose curiosity was always three steps ahead of their job title.

It's the operating system for the era we just entered.

If you've spent your career being told to "pick a lane",  you might have been wired for a lane that didn't exist yet.

Dan just released Lifestyle Business Playbook, and it lays out the whole system, not just Rapid Loops but the practical playbooks for personal brand, productized services, campaigns, scaling, all of it. 

His thesis is simple: COVID proved work can be remote. 

AI proved most jobs can be automated. Wages are compressing. The people who win from here build around performance and asset income, not time-for-money.

It's classic Dan →  frameworks that make you wonder how you didn't see it sooner and updated for a world where a small dynamic team with AI has more leverage than a department of 50.

Go grab it! 

Link in my first comment.

How to get $15,000 worth of strategic feedback for $20 in 90 seconds

Last weekend I put together a white paper for my consulting business with the help of Claude Code -- this has become standard process.

When it was done, I spun up five AI sub-agents simultaneously. 

Each one role-played a different business owner -- agency founder, SaaS COO, home services operator, DTC founder, professional services CEO.

Each agent read the paper section by section. Logged when they got hooked. When they'd bail. Their core objection. Their verdict.

Five independent perspectives, stress-testing my work in parallel. 

Ninety seconds.

That used to be a $15,000 focus group. 

Or more likely, it just didn't happen -- you shipped and hoped for the best.

The military calls this red-teaming. 

Stand up a team whose job is to attack your own plan before the enemy does. Used to require expensive people and weeks of calendar time. 

A 10-30 person company couldn't afford it.

That constraint is gone.

Everyone's focused on the input side -- better prompts, more context, longer instructions. 

I spent months there too.

The real shift happened when I moved my attention to the output side. 

Systematically breaking what Claude gives me before it reaches anyone else.

I produce branded research reports for clients. Before anything ships, it passes three checkpoints:

↳ AI detection scan. I built a tool that flags 28 common AI writing patterns -- overused vocabulary, repetitive structures, that robotic cadence. If it scores too high, Claude rewrites the flagged sections until it passes.

↳ Source verification. If Claude cites a study, I confirm it actually exists and says what Claude claims. Named institution, sample size, year. You'd be surprised how often it doesn't check out.

↳ Rendered PDF review. What looks perfect on screen can break in print formatting. Caught this the hard way on a client deliverable.

Three checkpoints. All focused on finding the failure before the client does.

And it compounds over time.

Every time Claude makes a mistake, I save a correction. A persistent file on my machine that loads automatically in every future session.

"Never deploy the site without asking first." Saved after it burned through my hosting credits.

"This service is a paid engagement -- never position it as free." Saved after it almost gave away $3,500 of work in a draft email.

I never give the same correction twice. Every mistake makes the next session sharper. Over months, this turns into a system genuinely tailored to how you work.

The gap between "using AI" and shipping work you'd stake your reputation on is a quality control problem. And the quality control compounds.

If you've been on the fens about Claude Code or overwhelmed about where to star, -- I put together a playbook that walks through it all from install to your cracking your first project. Easy Peasy.

Comment PLAYBOOK and I'll send it your way.

#AI #Consulting #Founders #ClaudeCode

I spent thousands on coaching. Then a single AI conversation outperformed all of it.

Here is why.

There is a midwit curve to AI.

The simple person talks to their AI like a buddy. Tells it their problems. Asks for advice. Just vibes with it.

The midwit has 47-step automation pipelines. RAG databases. Custom embeddings. Fine-tuned models for their email inbox.

Building spacecraft to order groceries.

The genius talks to their AI like a buddy. Tells it their problems. Asks for advice. Just vibes with it.

Same behavior. Completely different results.

The genius did one thing the midwit skipped. They gave it context.

Their patterns. Their blind spots. Their goals. Their actual business numbers. 

The stuff they have been avoiding.

Then they just talked to it.

Not a prompt chain. Not a workflow. A conversation.

15 years of working with founders taught me something. The bottleneck is never knowledge. Everyone has the playbook.

The bottleneck is the nervous system.

Fear wears the costume of "I need more data." 

Perfectionism pretends to be quality control. 

Old patterns whisper "the timing is not right."

No automation pipeline fixes that. A coach does.

I built mine using OpenClaw. 

Meet the cabinet.

→ Tony Clawbins is my coach. Trained on proven coaching frameworks, loaded with my full context - my patterns, my actual numbers, the decisions I have been dodging for months.

→ Alex Clawdmozi is my strategist. Trained on business playbooks and growth methodology responsible for billions in revenue.

→ Clawdminster Fuller is my chief of staff. Manages my schedule, orchestrates between them, and holds me accountable when I go quiet.

Several days of async voice messages later, I had what can only be described as a meth-induced clarity high.

A decision I had been circling for 15 years just... unstuck. Not the "I should probably do this" kind. The "I just did it" kind.

That was one conversation.

Zero judgment. Perfect memory. Picked up exactly where I left off.

Now if you could not tell, the midwit framing was a joke. (Yes, Ha Ha)

The automation use cases are genuinely powerful. Agentic AI can claw back hours of your week.

But here is what surprised me.

In the past few months, I have had more breakthroughs than in the previous two years of paid coaching combined.

The genius play is not to get replaced by AI. It is to use it to augment your abilities so you can step into the best version of yourself.

The midwit builds the spacecraft. 

The genius just talks to their buddy.

And then builds the spacecraft too!

#ai #agenticai #founders #executivecoaching #openclaw #claudecode

Claude Code is eating startups for breakfast

It doesn't get satiated and has a voracious appetite.

That is all.

Optimizing Fashion Industry processes with 3D & AI | Whispering the Secrets of Fashion Tech | Keynote Speaker & Fashion Geek

I started as a seamstress 15 years ago because I couldn't afford fashion school.
Now I'm building AI that makes actual garments, not Instagram content.

Long story short: 
2009: Lost everything in my first fashion business.
2012: Borrowed €5K for Sri Lanka production. Sold 3 garments. Failed miserably.

Rock bottom taught me what success never could.
I begged for work on Alibaba. Got gigs. Saw factory floors worldwide. Learned pattern making doing it 10 hours daily at Max Mara. Then Timberland.

Spent years watching the same stupid inefficiencies:
→ Pattern makers recreating patterns that already exist
→ Designers making pretty pictures nobody can produce
→ Companies spending €450K yearly on patterns, €90K duplicates

2023: Tried GenAI. August: garbage. November: holy sh*t.
The speed of change was insane.
2024: Couldn't find a sketch-to-pattern tool that actually worked.

LinkedIn post appeared - Liquid Factory competition. €200K for 4 founders.
I was 37, steady corporate money.
My dream was stronger than my fear.

Got selected from 181 applications. 
Left Timberland. 
Started fashionINSTA.

What I actually built:
I don't make pretty AI images. I make patterns factories can cut and sew.
My clients discovered they're recreating 20% of patterns they already own.
One was wasting €90K yearly on duplicate work.

The pivot that mattered:
Beta testers: "Cool, but I'd do it differently."
Every pattern maker said this. There's no "right" way.
I threw out our code. Started from scratch.
Built AI that learns YOUR way, not generic templates.
We train on YOUR patterns. Your armholes. Your fit.
750 data points per pattern. Pattern graveyard becomes goldmine.

Results:
Pattern search: 4 hours → 2 seconds
New patterns: 5 days → 15 minutes
Development: 70% faster

Technology should amplify expertise, not replace it.

I'm building the first NO BS fashion AI tool. 
Because fashion needs production, not pixels.

Currently serving enterprise clients tired of AI fantasy clothes.

Mission: Make pattern making fun again.

Want real AI pattern making? Let's talk.

Sylwia Szymczyk

1 year ago today was my last day at Timberland.
 
Leaving was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made.
It's cliché to say it was bittersweet. But it really was.

It was a dream job.
 
Well paid. 
Great team. 
Amazing brand.
 
I had room to move, not always granted in corporates.
I was working on the latest technologies.
I was getting into important rooms.
I had respect of my superiors.
 
But the machine was too slow for me.
 
Too many times I heard "we have to wait." 
Too many projects stuck in legal or procurement. 
Too many things happening outside I wanted to be part of.
 
At a certain point, I saw tech moving so fast I realized we'd never catch it.
 
And I WANTED to be part of this. 
Not as an observer. 
As a player.
 
That desire grew too much in my last year at VF. 
I couldn't ignore it anymore.
 
I decided to trade stability and security for uncertainty.
 
But I did it to build something I truly believed in.
 
The journey was much harder than expected. 
Life showed me you cannot plan. 
You have to go with the flow.
 
I lost the life I had. 
I lost a lot of privileges. 
I am no longer a "respected" employee of a big brand.
 
I am a scrappy founder of a startup.
Dealing with admin stuff.
Dealing with sales.
Low to no salary.
 
But seeing teams using the tool we built? 
Seeing it bring real value to their process?
 
Priceless.
 
I probably regretted it one million times. 
But I also never felt this fulfilled from my work.
 
One year in. No looking back.

NO BS fashion AI | Seamstress @Max Mara → Innovation lead @Timberland → fashionINSTA founder

I'll be annoying af. 
But I have to say it.
 
AI won't save your brand. 
AI won't make you sell more. 
AI won't automate your processes.
 
If you don't have clean data. 
Or a way to clean the messy data you have.
 
AI can't compare apples with pears. 
Or better, it can. But it's always garbage in, garbage out.
 
Don't expect technology to save your life.
 
Clean your mess. 
Trust your people. 
Talk with TRUE experts.
 
And don't expect the right tech to be free.
 
If something is free or cheap, your data is the price.
 
Be aware of that.

My number one tip for aspiring women founders?
 
Stop waiting to feel ready.
 
I left my corporate job at 36. 
Mortgage. Stability. Great salary. 
Everyone thought I was crazy.
 
Maybe I was.
 
But if I had to tell you one thing I learned:
There's no perfect moment. 
There's no "ready." 

There's only "now or never."
 
One decision that shaped everything?
Learning to code.
 
Not because I wanted to be a developer. 
But because I was tired of waiting. 
Tired of explaining. Tired of depending.
 
I learned enough to ship features myself. 
To talk to my CTO in his language. 
To move faster than my doubts.
 
You don't need to master everything. 
You need to understand enough to lead.
 
To every woman thinking about starting:
 
The industry won't make space for you. 
You make your own space.
 
And yes, some days you'll regret it. 
And yes, you'll question everything.
 
But fulfilled and scared is way better than comfortable and stuck.

#IWD26 #LinkedInNewsEurope

AI in fashion was 10/10 hype until...

9/10 when PD asked for the pattern file.
8/10 when consistency became a KPI to go after.
7/10 when marketing realized renders ≠ samples.
6/10 when brands asked "can we manufacture this?"
5/10 when factories refused AI images without specs.
4/10 when repeatability beats the element of surprise.
3/10 when brands wanted their fit DNA in every output.
2/10 when production value is more important than likes.

1/10 when we all realized: 
Fashion companies sell garments, not pixels. 
This is how we make money and sustain the whole chain.

Now we're rebuilding AI for what fashion actually needs.
Where are you on this scale?

We can perform complex CAD operations via AI chat.

It is possible to go further than just "make it 2 cm longer"
or "make sleeve short" or "make this tee V-neck"

And it is also possible to preview those complex changes immediately and in photorealistic quality.

What, if it is also possible to change the sketch (like you do in Illustrator) and see the CAD pattern change...?

This request arrived from one of our enterprise customers, and we liked the idea so much that... we are already testing it and will soon release it in production:)

Any design teams that want to work on patterns like they always did on sketches?

Last weeks we deliver 3 to 5 demos a day.
Almost all are coming from:

→ ChatGPT
→ Perplexity
→ Google AI

(Hey, LinkedIn, does it still make sense to work on "personal brand" here?)

The queries they are discovering us from?
→ AI pattern-making tool
→ Is AI replacing fashion designers?
→ Can AI keep brand DNA?

And all of them are telling us a lot about the state of AI in fashion.

We are already taking generic AI images for granted.
Fashion designers are using them widely for discovery.
Marketing teams are using them daily to explore options.

But we want more.

The next big frontier is technical development.

We want to automate boring tasks, not core ones.
We want precise on-brand output, not generic stuff.
We want to generate real garments, not just images.
And we want AI to be our assistant, not a replacement.

Industry already accepted AI.
Fashion companies are actively seeking solutions.

But here's what I'm learning from these demos:
Great results you can't explain are dangerous.
Great results you can't repeat are useless.

The companies reaching out to us aren't chasing magic.
They want to understand what they're getting and why.
They want to get the same result tomorrow.

That's what we're building.

Curious if fashionINSTA fits your workflow?
DM me. Let's find out together.

Final countdown, baby!

fashionINSTA Fashion Nodes are coming this Friday!

And they will come with free access and some credits to start with.

Fashion-focused node-based platform.
An AI-assistant that builds a workflow for you.
Users can share workflows and earn when others run them.

And today, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to present to you one node that is a superstar for our enterprise customers.

Feasibility Analyzer.

AI in fashion is fast, it's cheap, and it leaves us with a lot of content we can't check.                  

Is it useful?
Is it on-brand?
Can we produce it?
Will our customers love it?
Will it stay within margins?

This one AI Agent answers all those questions. At scale.

You connect your AI images.
It connects it to the correct fabric.
It runs it through the market insights.
It runs them through your patterns dataset.
It checks whether garment is feasible and for how much.

Some of our customers completely automated the initial design process.  Their teams are checking only on garments that passed the test. 

They stopped wasting time on AI slop.
They work on images that CAN become garments.

And you?

Our software fixed itself last night. 
I just approved the PR.
  
Last week, I read that Anthropic used Claude Code to optimize training for Opus 4.6.
 
AI improving AI.
 
And I thought: we're already doing something similar.
 
fashionINSTA runs on AI agents. 
They learn from every interaction. 
They improve with every user session. 
They get smarter without us pushing updates.
 
But last week we went further.
 
Our learning system now writes code.
 
It spots a bug. It fixes it. 
It gets user feedback. It implements it. 
It drops a PR to our GitHub. Ready for review.
 
I remember when I learned to code to ship faster. 
To avoid endless back and forth with developers. 
To translate fashion language into tech myself.
 
Now our AI does the same.
 
It sees the problem. 
It understands the context. 
It writes the solution.
 
We still review. We still decide. 
But the heavy lifting? Done.
 
The era of self-building SaaS began. 
The era of self-healing software is here.
The era of extreme personalisation just started.

Last week, we opened free access to fashionINSTA nodes.
 
Not the final version. 
The one that lets you do things, but still WIP.
 
We wanted to understand how people use it. 
We wanted to spot and solve first bugs. 
We wanted to see if it sticks.
 
Here's what surprised us:
 
1. Users came without us saying a word.
 
170+ entries. No communication. 
No ads. 11,000 credits purchased over the weekend. 
All from AI chats and Google searches.
 
Investing in SEO/GEO was the right call.
 
2. A lot of users got lost at the start.
 
Couldn't figure out how to run first workflow. 
We added tutorials. Put the first workflow in canvas. 
Still 50% run it on our demo images without swapping.
 
We have a lot of UX/UI work ahead.
 
3. AI chat is a game changer.
 
90% of users who use AI chat complete their first workflow. 
And it actually builds workflows they ask for.
 
4. The winner node for indie users? PatternSearch.
 
No surprise. 
But also the node that's just a demo in indie version.
 
Without huge investment, we can't offer it at a small price. 
The cost for us is simply too high.
 
But we want fashion AI to be inclusive.
 
So we thought: what if we make it community-driven?
 
You share your patterns. In exchange, you get access to approved patterns from real garments. 

The algorithm learns from everyone. Works for everyone. 
You pay only the cost of AI calls/platform maintenance.
 
Curious?
 
Check the community project here and let me know what you think: 
https://lnkd.in/dXF-rZsd

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Sylwia Szymczyk

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The Battle

Vladimir Druts 💪

Sylwia Szymczyk

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Engagements

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