The Day 10 Client Wasn’t Delusional. He Was Early.

Around 2011, Konstantin Tsybulko and his team had a name for a certain kind of client.

The “Day 10 client.”

It was the founder who looked at a project plan, saw the first ten days budgeted for setting up environments and writing tickets, and pushed back. He wanted to see something real by the end of day 10.

Back then, that was impossible. It became an internal joke.

Today, it’s the name of his company.

Konstantin spent his career in tech consulting and, as chief revenue officer, helped scale his previous firm from $35 million to $200 million. He’s now co-founder and CEO of Day10, an AI transformation firm focused on healthcare and other highly regulated, data-intensive industries. He joined me in person for this week’s episode of Built to Finish.

What struck me most wasn’t the technology. It was the business model problem he saw coming.

AI is designed to compress timelines and shrink teams. The traditional development shop is built on large teams and long timelines.

Those two things can’t coexist for long. So he left and built something designed for the new reality from day one.

He told me a go-to-market team that once took fifty people, he could now run with ten. Same output. His entire marketing operation runs on one person who builds new automations every single week.

Then he said something every founder of an established company should sit with:

“Your clients are paying for every inefficiency you created.”

You weren’t wrong when you built it that way. It made sense at the time. But a business built for the pre-AI era carries costs a newer competitor doesn’t. Sooner or later, customers notice.

So do buyers.

A buyer isn’t just evaluating your revenue. They’re evaluating how your company will compete for the next five years. If your cost structure, staffing model, and workflows look like they did in 2019, that’s a question mark on your valuation.

So where do you start?

Konstantin sees companies get it wrong in two directions. Some automate something too small to matter, see no results, and decide AI doesn’t work for them. Others go after what one of his clients called “a grizzly bear,” a problem so big the organization can’t digest it, and end up shelving the whole thing.

His advice: pick something digestible, meaningful, and measurable. Something that lowers cost or opens a new revenue stream.

And hire for curiosity. Nearly everyone on his team is a former founder. He doesn’t need people who know every AI model. He needs people who constantly ask how AI could make their work better.

We also talked about why, in a world getting more technological by the day, in-person connection matters more than ever. He made the trip to record face to face for exactly that reason. I hope future guests take the hint.

Listen to the full conversation with Konstantin Tsybulko.

If a Day 10 client walked into your company tomorrow, what could you show them?

– Steven Pivnik