The Dishes and Laundry - How AI Agents Can Help Founders Avoid the “BoreOut”

The Dishes and Laundry - How AI Agents Can Help Founders Avoid the “BoreOut”

Art & Writing v. Dishes and Laundry

There’s an old quote about AI that has stuck with me over the past few years building AI startups:

"You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." It was a tweet that went viral from Joanna Maciejewska (@AuthorJMac), March 29, 2024 getting more than 3M views, and generating a lot of polarized opinions.

From my perspective, Maciejewska was spot on. And not because generative AI can’t create nice looking pictures or cogently written email copy. Depending on your bar for taste, it can certainly deliver those things. Where her comment resonated most with me was in differentiating the daily activities that give us energy and joy from those that are merely required daily activities. Basically: art vs. chores.

To me, art is simply the set of creative activities one engages in that makes them hum; getting them into flow state, and bringing them joy and feelings of strength. That can mean vastly different things for different people.

Doing the dishes, folding the laundry, or engaging in any other daily chores distract from those activities, and that’s Maciejewska’s point – AI should help with that.

The Art & Chores of Building Startups

Startup founders have to do it all: the chores and the art. For technical founders, the art might be building perfect solutions for users that feel like magic. For commercial founders, it might be connecting with customers and users, building deep relationships. For solopreneurs, it’s definitely both.

The unfortunate reality of startup life is that most founders spend way too much time on doing the chores, and not nearly enough time on creating their art. Running a tech startup can often feel like having a never ending list of chores, and one area that this really stacks up is in the execution of go-to-market motions.

I see a lot of expert opinions on LinkedIn, Reddit, and X giving founders good advice – specifically, to focus on one channel at a time; find out what works, and scale from there. Fundamentally, I agree with this advice.

The problem with this guidance is that it fails to acknowledge that even making one channel effective involves a wide range of operational activities that are anything but artistic. You don’t just implement an AISDR and hit go. Any GTM channel requires a litany of chores to be done to map conversions, track CRM inputs, measure impact, validate and qualify leads, before the actual art–the writing of the copy–can even begin. A fully fleshed out GTM stack involves:

• Website updates, landing page variants, form routing;
• Google Tag Manager, pixel QA, attribution debugging;
• Content research, editorial calendars, blog scheduling;
• Social posting across 3–5 channels; extension to substack;
• Email sequences, list hygiene, deliverability monitoring;
• Pipeline reviews, CRM data entry, lead scoring;
• Analytics dashboards, weekly performance reports

This is logistical, operational, rote, and manual. It has to get done, but it’s not why a founder starts a company. These are the dishes. This is the laundry. These are chores.

Agents & The Boreout Trap

The impact on founders is real. It’s what Channing Allen refers to as “boreout” – this work is just boring. As Allen puts it,

“Burnout is much more tightly correlated to working on things that suck your energy than the number of hours worked. You can work 10 hours a week and still feel like you're burning out if what you're doing for those 10 hours is quite draining."

Even at the top of the S&P 500, with armies of support staff, executives can't escape the operational grind. Now picture a 5-person B2B SaaS startup where the founder is also the marketer, the SDR, the CMS admin, and the analytics owner. Founders aren't short on creativity, they're short on hours to express it

The problem isn't "AI doing work" - it's which work. If AI were to take the energy-draining operational work, founders could work longer on the energy-giving creative work without burning out, or getting mind-numbingly bored with low-skill operational work.

It’s my opinion that autonomous agents, operating API-based tools, can help founders by running the GTM execution layer end-to-end, so they can spend more time on their art.

Agents can learn the business process architecture of a well-optimized funnel, then run it. Founders orchestrate, read the work, write their own content, make real sales calls.

That's the thesis I’m validating. That agents can be trained and orchestrated to deliver a service: GTM operational execution.

Some may push back on this, saying that ‘marketing is art’; and I wouldn’t disagree, it’s just that the part of the art that matters is the part that humans should be doing. Let’s let AI handle the chores. Maciejewska was right: the industry has spent two years building the wrong AI - the art-replacing kind. I want to build the right AI - the chores-automating kind.