From Meta to Mindset Shift: How Eric Levine Built StratEngine AI After Quitting Without a Plan

After walking away from a corporate career at Meta with no plan and everything to lose, Eric Levine rebuilt from the ground up—first launching a personal diving app, then discovering a passion for leveraging AI to solve strategic business problems. In this edition of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight series, Eric shares how he turned uncertainty into innovation, creating StratEngine AI to help consultants and business leaders cut through complexity with speed and clarity. His story is one of reinvention, proving that sometimes the most powerful strategies are born when you finally stop following the script.

Hi, Eric! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

StratEngine AI helps consultants and business leaders turn complex business challenges into clear, actionable strategies. The platform uses AI to generate structured frameworks, strategic analysis, and presentation-ready outputs — cutting what usually takes weeks of manual work down to minutes. We serve independent consultants, SMB companies, and strategy-minded operators who want to move faster without sacrificing depth or quality. The impact is simple: we help professionals spend less time formatting and researching, and more time thinking strategically and delivering value to their clients.

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

I kind of backed into becoming an entrepreneur. At the time, I was working at Meta and decided to quit without a plan — I just knew I needed a break from the corporate grind. After taking some time off, I started building a scuba diving app for myself, which later became SCUBAzen. It wasn’t meant to be a business; it was just a personal project. I wanted a tool that fit how I dive, and I couldn’t find anything like it in the app stores.

Once I got it live, I realized I’d accidentally picked up a new skill set. For the first time, I didn’t need to find a technical cofounder to bring an idea to life. Around the same time, I was getting deep into AI and realizing how much it could have improved my job back at Meta — everything from planning to research and presentation work. That’s when I started thinking: what if I built the product I wish I’d had?

I began sketching out a business plan and testing the concept that would become StratEngine AI. It took a while to find my footing — there were plenty of points where I wasn’t sure it would actually work — but once the technology clicked and I saw real value in it, I was all in. That’s the moment I stopped tinkering and truly felt like an entrepreneur.

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

For most of my career, I assumed I’d climb the corporate ladder all the way to the C-suite of a multinational company. That was the goal. But as I got closer to it — sitting in the rooms, seeing how decisions were made, navigating the politics, and watching good ideas get watered down — I realized it wasn’t making me happy. The environment that I once thought represented success just didn’t feel fulfilling anymore.

That realization built slowly until I couldn’t ignore it. I decided to quit without a plan — no safety net, no next move — just the need to step away and start from scratch. There’s a line from Little Fires Everywhere that captures it perfectly: “Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning, the soil is richer, and new things can grow.” That’s exactly how it felt. I had to clear everything away — the structure, the expectations, the safety — to make room for something new.

Once I left, I was surprised by how much lighter I felt. Even without a job or a plan, I was happier and more creative than I’d been in years. That clarity made it obvious that the corporate path wasn’t for me anymore. If I was going to build something meaningful, it had to be on my own terms — and that mindset is what ultimately led me toward entrepreneurship.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

FlutterFlow has been the single biggest game-changer for me. It’s the tool that made everything possible. I’ve experimented with other AI-assisted builders like Replit, Bolt.new, and Lovable — and while they’re great for quick prototypes or proofs of concept, they don’t give you the control needed to build something you can actually take to market.

With FlutterFlow, I can customize every element — from the design and layout down to the logic and backend integrations — all without a technical background. It strikes the perfect balance between power and accessibility, walking you through the entire development process while still letting you build something truly your own. Without it, I wouldn’t have learned how to use AI in a real coding environment, or understood what it actually takes to build, launch, and maintain a production-level app.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

My biggest pivot wasn’t a single failure — it was realizing that the path I’d spent my entire career working toward wasn’t actually the right one for me. I had always planned to climb the corporate ladder and eventually reach the C-suite. But once I got close to it, I saw how much of the job was politics, bureaucracy, and diluted decision-making. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend my life doing.

Leaving that world with no plan felt like failure at the time — like I was throwing away everything I’d built. But in hindsight, that decision changed everything. It forced me to rebuild from scratch, to relearn what fulfillment and success actually meant to me. That space eventually led me to create SCUBAzen, and then StratEngine AI. The biggest lesson was that walking away isn’t the same as giving up — sometimes it’s the only way to find a direction that’s actually your own.

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

When my paid marketing efforts weren’t landing and my beta users weren’t giving the level of feedback I needed, I realized I had to take a different approach. My network was being polite — too polite — and I needed unfiltered opinions from people who didn’t know me and wouldn’t worry about hurting my feelings.

So I started doing manual outreach on LinkedIn, messaging consultants and executives one by one — not to pitch them, but simply to ask about their pain points and thoughts on strategy tools. There was no delegation or automation involved, just hundreds of genuine conversations. It was slow, but it worked. Those raw insights and early connections gave me the clarity I needed to refine StratEngine AI and bring it to market with confidence.

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

Start your marketing before you start building. Get your domain, social handles, and basic promotional materials in place early — even if your product isn’t ready yet. You don’t need finalized features to start building presence and credibility. Marketing takes time to warm up: SEO needs months to mature, algorithms need consistency, and an audience takes repetition to trust you.

By the time you actually launch, you want people — and search engines — to already know you exist. Having your assets and content in place from day one gives you momentum and legitimacy, instead of feeling like you’re starting from zero the day your product goes live.

Want to dive deeper into Eric's work? Check out the links below!

• Visit StratEngine AI's website: get.stratengineai.com
• Visit StratEngine AI's blog page: Blog
• Follow StratEngine AI on Instagram: stratengine.ai
• Learn more about Scubazen app: Scubazen