He Sold $70K Websites. Then He Killed the Model Himself

"This thing that we've done, been the best in the world at, at a very high ticket, is getting completely cannibalized." Dima Kozlov is describing his own company. Influex spent a decade building iconic brands and world-class websites, and branding and web design sit near the top of any honest list of the things AI made people stop needing an agency for. Sitting down with Mike Bledsoe, he walks through the choice it left him: defend the model, or take it apart himself. He took it apart. The first move was building the tools and the education that let people do the work without him.

The part that surprises people is that AI did not hand him the idea. He had outlined the model he runs now back in 2023, before most of his market was paying attention. What changed was feasibility. What came with it was harder: deliverables stopped being the product. Brand identity, website, funnel. Those are the things clients used to buy, and they are the things clients now care least about. Every sales call is about results and ROI, because the website itself is something a client can get in an afternoon.

Then there is the competitor every service business is quietly worried about. The twenty five year old who is AI-native, carries almost no overhead, and ships in fifteen days what used to take ninety. Dima does not pretend that work is worse. Sometimes, he says, it is genuinely better, precisely because of how they use AI. Where Mike takes it next is not about craft at all. The craft got cheap. Knowing where to point it did not.

The most concrete stretch of the hour is about sales, and it is the part to watch. Dima was always strong on the call and slow on the proposal, and for years deals died in that gap. AI closed it. Then his team installed something he had not thought to build himself, a coach that reads every one of his calls and rewrites the script for the next one, and he found a use for it that had nothing to do with calls at all. A multiple five figure proposal had gone silent for forty five days. He had already written it off.

I wouldn't have thought of that, and I would have just let the deal go.

Also in the hour: why he stopped taking retainers, what an afternoon with AI now replaces that used to take six months of analysis, and what he is doing with origin story video that used to cost five figures to produce. The through line does not change. The coach was not his idea and not his expertise, and it worked anyway, because you can now install the best thinking in the world in a field you were never going to master and run it alongside your own. He did not become a better operator. He owns one. Which is exactly what he did to his own business model, deliberately, about a year before the market would have done it for him.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: He Sold $70K Websites. Then He Killed The Model Himself