From Direct Mail to AI: How I Ended Up Building VYNS

Essay

When I was 12, my dad brought home a Xerox machine.

I printed 1,000 flyers for a landscaping business I decided to start, loaded them into my backpack, and walked our neighborhood all day putting them in mailboxes. The next morning our home phone rang. A man wanted ten forty-foot hemlocks removed from his property. My dad had answered the call and was confused and then stunned, telling the man he didn't know what he was talking about. They went back and forth for some time about the mailer that described "Caruso Landscaping" services, something my dad knew nothing about but this man was adamant about being real, and then he laughed as he caught the eye of his oldest son and it all started to make sense in his mind. He apologized to the man, explained that he hadn't known this had happened and we didn't have the equipment to get the job done, and hung up the phone. Then he verified what I had done and we laughed together for a good ten minutes about it. I remember beaming when he told me it was the coolest thing he had ever seen a kid my age do on his own.

I did not have a word for what I was trying to do back then. It was just instinct and I wanted a way to make money and help people at the same time. I had access to a lawnmower and the best I could come up with at the time was walking the neighborhood with it to make some spare cash. I can't remember if I was overly ambitious on the initial direct mail offerings by including tree removal as an option or if the person saw landscaping being advertised and just assumed we could do it. Either way, I just thought I would figure it out when someone called. Fast forward a couple of months later and my dad and I had a trailer with some lawn care equipment loaded onto it. My 7th grade teacher Mrs. Russo was our first customer, I had solicited her business between quiz grading and history lessons. But basically, I was just hustling. I remember trying several ideas out during those formative years between middle school and high school graduation: buying candy boxes at Costco and reselling to friends at school, trading Pokemon cards to stack rares in a collection I still have today, shoveling snow from people's driveways. My little sister still gets frustrated when I remind her I came up with an idea to create "Sea Pets" and asked her to get feedback from her friends. I had heard about the pet rock, and decided an aquarium with replica aquatic life that you could purchase and add to your collection would be a hit. Most of her friends liked the idea but I had no way of following through. But that was always my mind, creating, thinking up something new to build, ideating. At the end of high school, I decided I would push that energy into writing a book. I remember everyone around me doubting me, from telling me I wasn't an author to literally laughing in my face at the idea. But by 2010, I had a third draft polished edit of a mystery novel that I self published on Amazon called Written in Blood. It's still there to this day, with two five star reviews. I just got things done that I wanted to do.

The Years In Between

I went to college as an undeclared major. Exploratory is what they called it. The main reason I went was because I listened to the advice of everyone around me, who cared for me, and it was the best path they could think of for a young person graduating high school. My family were all proud and pushed me toward graduating with a bachelor degree because I'd be the first student to graduate in my immediate family circle. My friends were all applying to multiple schools and seemed to have their career figured out. I decided to apply to just one, the University of Connecticut, because I loved the UConn Huskies. I got in, spent a year meandering about what my career should be, and eventually decided business school made the most sense for me to pursue. In the end I studied Finance at UConn's School of Business. But during my time at the school, I decided to form a club called the Residual Income Club. I was infatuated with how people were able to make passive income from real estate investments, through royalties, and other methods in business. At the time I had joined an MLM company and believed the club would be a good vehicle to connect with like minded people. I did connect with some great friends, some I still know to this day, but the club didn't last long. We had organized an event in conjunction with another entrepreneurial club on campus. Long story short, MLMs were viewed by many, especially my Finance professor who was the conduit to my club surviving, as pyramid schemes and fraudulent by nature. We had told our guests not to mention the term MLM and to instead focus on educating about the opportunities that had helped them earn residual, passive income. Half way through, one gentleman gave that advice the boot and basically turned our educational seminar into a recruiting event. Half the audience left, my club advisor resigned, and the Residual Income Club was effectively closed down. But my mind kept wondering what I could build or do as I went through college getting mediocre grades other than the classes I was interested in, like Italian Film, or the one that I competed with my then girlfriend, now wife, in to see who could get better grades. Spoiler: it was Micro-economics and it was me who won. A versus A minus, I believe. But to her defense she's a brilliant mind in the sciences.

After that came the workforce, which mostly meant executing other people's visions. I was good at it. I was also restless in a way I could not fully articulate at the time. The ideas kept coming. The tolerance for them inside the organizations I worked in did not. My first job was as a summer intern at an insurance agency in the marketing department. They paid us $15 an hour basically to help make cold calls to drive leads to the producers at the agency. Three of us were chosen out of a pool of 50 plus applicants, so I felt proud about that. When the summer ended, I learned how to speak to people over the phone and convince them to schedule a call with an agent for an insurance review. At the end of the internship, I was not asked to stay on board as an Account Executive, another one of my intern cohorts was. But I convinced the owner to give me a go. I ended up continuing to polish my book for hard copy publishing format during work hours, try affiliate marketing online for an Acai supplement, and eventually my good friend Ari and I decided to start an electronics recycling company together and resell old electronics on Amazon. I actually got my insurance agency to use our electronics recycling company to remove all of their old PCs and compliantly destroy hard drives, allowing us to resell other parts of the machines on eBay and Amazon. We made some money, but all the while I was distracted from my job and performing in the lower to middle of the pack. One December, I got particularly fired up because all the other agents mentioned that no one makes sales during that month and it's basically two to three weeks of vacation at the end of the year because no one answers the phone. I decided to get to work at breaking that mold. The results: I sold over $40,000 in annual premium that month, a new company record for December. To put it in perspective, our top agents were averaging $25,000 to $40,000 in annual premium a month during the regular season. It was satisfying to prove to myself I could do this, but again, my motivation wore off in the new year because I just wasn't interested in being a cog in someone else's wheel.

From there, I spent time at several startups. I was asked to join the founding council of a new MLM my friends were creating that used home security DIY technology as a product, which felt cool but ultimately failed. I joined a friend's company and helped in many areas of his business. He's still a good friend today and doing well, and he's the one that told me everything changed when he focused on one thing at a time. I learned what it looks like when a company moves fast and what it looks like when one has too much money and not enough discipline. I watched ideas I believed in get shelved for reasons that had nothing to do with whether they were good. I watched ideas get implemented without credit being given. At some point you accumulate enough of those experiences that you stop being surprised by them and start thinking about what you would do differently if it were your call.

It was never really my call at any of those places. That bothered me more than I admitted at the time. I also never really accounted for the true reason I never fully committed to that one thing: fear of failure in other people's eyes. Friends, family, colleagues. I valued their opinions way too much over my own instinct so I spent most of my days being mediocre in my jobs and daydreaming about the day I could build something of my own. Gary Vaynerchuk hits this point home very often in his content and on his social pages. You have one life and you have to take your at bat. I was spending too much time accounting for things that didn't exist or didn't matter.

The Pivot That Was Not Really a Pivot

I got my real estate license thinking it might be a way to build something of my own with lower startup costs and a faster path to income.

What actually happened is that I spent nine months not selling real estate. My mind kept drifting to technology. I started thinking about how AI could help sellers list their homes without a traditional agent. That turned into a concept called Purple Dog Listings. That turned into thinking about AI-assisted seller financing and creating a marketplace for FSBOs. I even pitched one of the higher ups at our agency on building a custom platform for builders to upload their listing inventory that would monitor the status of the build and update the MLS for them automatically, and got approval. But in the end, I realized none of these visions were big enough. That turned into thinking about AI roadmaps for any business, which led to all of the ideas I have listed on frankcarusojr.com. Eventually, all of that turned into VYNS.

I did not plan that path. I followed the thing I kept thinking about most: AI.

What AI Changed

I had been having the same internal argument for years. The ideas were there. The execution was the problem. Building software at the pace and quality I needed required a team I could not afford, and raising money to hire that team meant giving up the thing I had spent years wanting, which was control over what I was building and why. I had taken a full stack coding bootcamp and learned a little bit of everything but I didn't finish it because at the end of the day, I didn't want to be an engineer or computer programmer. I wanted to be a solo founder and operator, unconstrained by the viewpoints of others who couldn't match my speed, willingness to adapt or kill an old idea, risk tolerance, or creative ability.

AI changed that equation. Not metaphorically. Literally. I can now build things that would have required a team of engineers, a product manager, and a designer. I do it alone, with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and other AI tools as technical collaborators, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.

VYNS exists because of that shift. Not because I suddenly had resources I did not have before. Because the resource constraint that had blocked me for years stopped being a constraint. I also decided to listen to my friend, who used to run a full time job while running a full time business but saw things change meaningfully when he put his full effort into one thing. So that's what I'm doing, giving VYNS my all.

What VYNS Actually Is

The short version is that VYNS is an AI business intelligence platform for solopreneurs and creators. You give it a URL, it analyzes your digital presence, identifies where AI can help, and gives you a prioritized roadmap.

The longer version is that I am building it because I keep seeing the same problems everywhere I look. Small business owners are drowning in noise about AI, especially solo founders who need what AI can provide but haven't convinced themselves yet that they do. They know they should be doing something with it. They do not know what, or in what order, or whether the tools being marketed to them actually apply to their situation. The result is either paralysis or random tool adoption that does not connect to anything. Both are processes I went through myself and know intimately.

VYNS is being built to be the layer that sits above the tools. It tells you what you actually need before you spend money on the thing someone is trying to sell you. It gives you actionable steps specific to your business or creator profile online and your goals as a digital founder and operator.

The Connecting Thread

Looking back at the flyers in the backpack at age 12, the years that felt unproductive because I spent more time daydreaming about what I would do if the business I was operating in were my own, the nine months of not selling real estate, the ideas that got shelved in other people's companies, and the decision to build VYNS, the through line is obvious in retrospect. It was never obvious in the moment.

I kept building things even when I did not have the right tools. I kept generating ideas even when the environment did not reward them. Eventually the tools caught up to what I was trying to do. Now they're advancing at a pace that some are even being gated from the public because we're not ready for them. So I've decided to dive in head first. I'm still a referral agent with my Keller Williams agency down here in Florida, my coach is now my referral partner and willing to help anyone I send her way find their dream home. But I'm giving my all to this dream of building something that can help the solo founder trying to navigate their way through the AI landscape.

That is the story of how I ended up here. The Xerox machine is still part of it. We've just come a long way since those days.

If this resonated, follow the build. I write when something ships, breaks, or changes my thinking.