I own a 45-yr-old manufacturing and home services business in AZ. Join me as I spend my days finding new ways to apply AI and vibe coding in a real business.
Arizona
Joined October 2022
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I write a lot of threads about #SMBTwit topics like search funds, SBA-funded acquisitions, and operations.
Here is a live list of my threads to date:
Derek Turner retweeted
this book hit young men so hard because you’re in middle school being forced to read the absolute worst most torturous irrelevant things imaginable for multiple years and then out of nowhere they hit you with 200 pages of “kid has to survive in the woods with an axe”
EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is developing a movie adaptation of "Hatchet," Gary Paulsen’s 1987 young adult survival novel.
• The film will be written and directed by Derek Cianfrance, best known for films such as “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines.”
• Per the synopsis: “Hatchet” follows “13-year-old Brian Robeson, who is stranded alone in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash with nothing but the hatchet his mother gave him.”
• Paulsen later expanded the story into a five-book series that included “The River” (1991), “Brian’s Winter” (1996), “Brian’s Return” (1999) and “Brian’s Hunt” (2003).
wp.me/pc8uak-1lHWxk
Hot Take: You and your team should invest 0 minutes into following the latest LLM models and learning the difference between Dots and Grokbot. Your AI work should be contained in a specific role or an outsourced firm so you can get the benefits of AI without distraction.
Derek Turner retweeted
We re-wrote our 8 year old codebase from scratch with AI. (In Rust)
It resulted in a 23.4x increase in feature delivery vs our 1.0 platform.
This is the only way for legacy SaaS companies to survive and become AI native.
Our Postscript 2.0 launch is not (only) about Email. It’s total rebuild, setting a new foundation on 8 years of learnings.
As far as I can tell, we are the first “SaaSpocalypse” era company to do this at scale, and we believe this will become the new normal for companies of our age and size.
Here’s why:
1. We no longer have tech debt.
2. We upgraded to state-of-the-art systems and databases.
3. Our software delivery pipeline is built with AI in mind from day 1.
It allowed us to turn around customer feedback within 24 hours during our email alpha. We are able to write and re-write massive chunks of the codebase to deliver on customer needs with 0 downtime.
We predict this will also scale as we onboard new customers. It will be challenging, but 100% achievable.
I understand there will be doubters and haters. It will take them time to digest. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the right move and will become the new normal. Adapt to the new world or get steamrolled by those who do.
Postscript is now competing against companies that have 15+ year old codebases while ours is <6 months old and has accelerating feature delivery. You do the math.
🤖 Made with AI
Derek Turner retweeted
SaaS is failing us.
We bought software to remove work.
It created work!
So much so that people think their JOB is the software - not helping customers.
Upload it to Jotform. Check the ERP. Compare it with QuickBooks. Find the email. Fix the Zap. Update HubSpot.
We turned every salesperson into a CRM administrator, every CFO into a data engineer, and every operator into a systems integrator.
Then we gave everybody AI.
THIS MAKES IT 100X WORSE.
Should I use Claude? Is that Codex? Can I get an API key? What the fuck is a token?
I'M A ROOFER LEAVE ME ALONE.
From an ROI perspective, unknown.
From a security perspective, unknown.
Does it make us more money? Unknown.
It is a lot of movement and not a lot of progress.
The answer is not another tool.
We need a different way to get work done.
We are very close to having very opinionated answer to this question.
Max Richter re AI helping him get through the "stuck" part of composing:
"And I’m like, “Well, that’s what I’m after. I want to experience the struggle of trying to figure it out.”"
This is the tension of AI summed up.
200TH EPISODE: “I’m trying to do the maximum with the minimum. I don’t want to clutter the world up. There’s a lot of music in the world, so I want to tell the story with the minimum amount of material.” @maxrichtermusic
0:00 Max Richter: Composers in Search of New Colors
9:25 Electronics & Orchestra as One Instrument
18:14 When a Piece Is Finished & "Daylight" Origins
26:40 The Blue Notebooks & Live Audiences
30:57 Influences, Synth & Reworking Schubert
37:53 Studio Rituals, Meditation & Beauty in Music
43:10 Devotion, Folk Roots & Regional Styles
50:43 Meditation, Collaboration & The Beatles
57:09 Recording, Favorite Records & The Sleep Project
1:08:01 Spirituality, Sacred Spaces & Math of Music
1:19:48 AI, Streaming, Film Scoring & Closing Reflections
Running out of Claude usage quota is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from running out of internet and/or power.
I just want to figure out how to use AI in such a way that my work can look like this - no monitor, no keyboard. Paper, pen, thoughts, conversation (with people, and maybe with AI). For as much of my time as possible.
🤖 Made with AI
For those asking for concrete examples of my vibe-coded Teams-based AI agent doing actually helpful things, I give you a super basic but very helpful dilemma it helped solve for my SMB:
Wendell Berry's "Eyes-to-Acres" ratio is why I am such a believer in small business ownership staying local when possible. Hope to write an essay someday about this.
RIP Wendell Berry. What a treasure.
My brother Adam is the reason I started experimenting with vibe coding this year.
He's a tech founder and I own a small manufacturing/home services company.
Every business should be vibe coding! Just do it!
Why Co-CEOs for our $150M+ ARR startup?
because the broccoli 🥦 haired 20 year olds in SF are coming for our lunch.
We’re 8 years into building, geriatric in AI terms.
IMO the only way to compete with these fools is to embrace the broccoli energy ourselves.
that’s the thinking with Co-CEOs:
1. I build the version of our company that we would build if we were starting from scratch today. No tech debt, no org debt, no priors. 100% AI native company building
2. @ringmybeller owns the $150M business, the 20k customers, and the growth that’s paying for the experiment. This year we’ll grow 50% YoY profitably, it’s clearly working and he’s crushing.
The beauty of it is we haven’t yet unveiled the new version of the company. That’s coming in September.
"Postscript 2.0" takes 8 years of lessons and experience and combines it with the tactics and tools that benefit the 20 yr olds today.
It’s been one of the most painful things for us to do.
There’s endless change management, dissent from non-believers, lot’s to work we’ve created for ourselves.
To me, that’s much better than the alternative.
Disrupt yourselves before someone else does.
Derek Turner retweeted
"SaaS is durable!!"
97% reduction in a zapier bill"
proof:
12,000 daily - 400 daily
Derek Turner retweeted
Guys, I was so wrong about Grok @bot Yesterday I spent a few hours with it for my home service business because of your responses.
Connected it to my phone system. Now it listens to every call and sends a summary to our slack channel. Tags the right people, adds to our to-do list (saved me $250 because I can downgrade my phone subscription)
I connected it to Reddit and it’s scanning the site every day looking for people on my town’s r/channel who could be potential customers. Tags me when there’s a post I should see/engage with. Going to set up the same thing for other social media
I told it my goals for the week, it went into Notion, added a new page, and created a to-list based on our conversation. It created new calendar appointments for me, and re-wrote my follow up scripts.
I’m just getting started but am already seeing how this can be a real asset in my business
Absolutely wild.
