Earlier this year, I lost a $15K design deal to Claude.
Signed on Friday. Cancelled over the weekend, because the client rebuilt it himself with Claude Code in 24 hours.
I won't pretend it didn't sting. The site was (and still is) AI slop. But losing a signed contract to a weekend side project is a hard one to sit with.
For a few days, I was frustrated (to say the least). Then I started thinking differently about it, and made a call: start offering the thing that just cost me the deal.
So we did. We have a small, sharp development team, and we started adding real AI capabilities to what we offer: AI automation, AI integration, AI agents. Not just as an add-on to design work, but as standalone services.
Two months later, our first big one came in: a full AI integration connecting Pipedrive, Figma, Claude, Docusign, and Google Drive, built with Make and Claude.
That single project paid back everything we lost on the design deal.
Honestly, AI scared me for a while, and losing that deal made it real. But sitting in that fear wasn't getting me anywhere. The day I started integrating it into our daily operations instead of worrying about it, everything shifted.
I lost a design deal to AI and gained an AI business. I'll take it.
