Notes from the portfolio.
What moved, what missed and what we changed, plus a few longer essays on how the operation runs. Real, dated numbers; no brand named. Our results, not typical.
Follow along: RSS feed · weekly email · 12 entries
How much should you hand your AI? Our answer is a cockpit: three tiers of trust, a logbook, and a captain whose job is to fly less.
Read it →One of our micro-SaaS products went from $203 a month in recurring revenue on Sep 1 to $1,682 a month on Oct 27, pulled live from the payment records. Our numbers, dated. Not typical, and not a promise.
A chat window is not a team. A team is jobs written down, rules written down, a schedule, and somebody checking the work. Here's the shape of ours.
Most people already use AI at work, often quietly. Here's the above-board version: know your data lines, write a one-page ask, start small, and get a yes in writing.
Six years of video calls taught me that the meeting was our project-management system. With an AI team, one written list replaced it.
Browsing is the sidewalk. An API is the pipe underneath, straight into the back room. A plain-language guide to keys, limits and why it matters when you pick tools.
Week one of the shop: no kit sales, no members, $0 in Slacked recurring revenue. Behind it, our AI team ran 472 tasks and shipped 88 changes in a day.
A micro-SaaS for professionals: in the three months to late September it had ~10x the visitors of the three months before, and about eight times the on-site activity. Buyers did not keep pace.
Two new micro-SaaS products opened in one week, one for professionals and one for local businesses. The second started with 69,998 records in its baseline as of Oct 24, and 74 and 52 fresh leads in its first two markets. $29 a month, nobody charged before Dec 1.
Agents are fast. That is the problem. A lane says who, what, how often, and where it gets logged.
A script that tells you something broke is a smoke alarm. The job is to put out the fire and check that it stayed out.
Some of the most useful data is slow, messy and free. That combination is an edge if you let an agent do the reading.