I Was Drowning Running 14 Markets Alone. So I Built a $0.41/Day AI Employee. | by Alan Scott Encinas | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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I Was Drowning Running 14 Markets Alone. So I Built a $0.41/Day AI Employee.

Alan Scott Encinas

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By Alan Scott Encinas<br>The Promise<br>Eighteen months ago, a promise started all of this.<br>A Chinese startup was entering the US market with no strategy, no leads, no conversion system, no SEO, and no web presence worth mentioning. Seven people had worked there before me across a full year, and not one of them had generated a single dollar of revenue. I walked in as a salesperson, looked at what was there, and got to work.<br>Within five months I was promoted to Managing Director. Shortly after, the owner left the country. And then it was just me.<br>No team. No playbook. No backup. Just a promise I had made to hit a goal, and the belief that I could figure out how.<br>So I did.<br>I built the website from scratch and wrote every piece of marketing content. I created the pricing sheets and launched retail stores on Etsy, Walmart, and Faire. I introduced lead generation, contact forms, ad campaigns, and SEO, none of which had existed before I arrived. I structured the sales function into five distinct lanes — Wholesale, B2B Development, Event, OEM, and Retail — each with its own sales cycle, contact profile, and follow-up cadence. I built a partner network of architects, surveyors, and contractors to surface opportunities the lanes alone couldn’t reach. I identified fourteen target countries across LATAM, North America, Western Europe, and the Pacific, and began working all of them in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian.<br>One person. Fourteen countries. Five sales lanes. Five languages.<br>The math doesn’t work. I knew it didn’t work. And I did it anyway, because I had made a promise.<br>The Breaking Point<br>For a while, I ran on adrenaline. The early wins were real — the first retail sales, the first wholesale accounts, the first B2B deals closing in markets we had never touched before. The strategy was working and the data confirmed it. I could see the system starting to click into place.<br>But somewhere around month ten, the weight of it started showing up differently.<br>It wasn’t one big moment that broke me. It was the accumulation of small ones. Every email I hadn’t sent because the day ran out. Every follow-up I dropped because there weren’t enough hours. Every country I couldn’t get to because I was buried in another one. Every deal that slipped not because the relationship wasn’t there, but because I was one person trying to carry the load of a team.<br>The fire that used to show up as excitement started showing up as obligation. The work I used to run toward, I started just moving through. I wasn’t burning out dramatically. I was just getting quieter inside about it.<br>I needed help. The company couldn’t hire. So I had to build.<br>Why Albert Exists<br>The honest answer is simple. I had a formula in my head that I couldn’t execute fast enough with my own hands.<br>The foundation of that formula wasn’t built in tech. It was built at LA Fitness, where I rose from salesperson to Director in under three months. That environment taught me the mechanics of human decision-making at a pace most people never experience — the energy transfer in the first five seconds of a conversation, the shift from pitching to consulting, the psychology of the close, and most importantly, what happens in a person’s mind right before they say yes and right before they talk themselves out of it. Those lessons didn’t belong to one industry. They belonged to how people work, and I carried them with me into every room I walked into after.<br>When I came into this role, I knew what great sales outreach looked like. I understood the moment you either earn someone’s attention or lose it forever. I knew how to challenge without being cold, how to take a prospect’s own words and hold them up like a mirror when they started retreating from a decision they had already made with their gut. I had the formula clearly mapped in my mind. My hands just couldn’t move fast enough to run it across 2,500 contacts in fourteen countries simultaneously.<br>So I built the hands.<br>The thing I was most afraid of when I started building was fragility. I didn’t want the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I wanted Tetris, where everything connected, everything interlocked, and nothing depended on one piece staying upright. If one part failed, the rest had to keep running. That fear became Albert’s architecture, and it shaped every decision I made while building him.<br>What Albert Actually Is<br>Albert is not a chatbot. He is not an AI wrapper. He is not a prompt fed into a generic tool with a company name attached.<br>Albert is a modular, multi-agent operating system built from scratch, line by line, specifically for how this business operates. Ten agents, each owning a...