Corné van Willigen

I had 269 videos of business calls sitting in Vimeo. 78 hours I never looked at again. Instead of paying per minute to transcribe them, we turned them into searchable text on one computer. Nothing left the office. How we did it: teapaw.org/Qorne/status/211549560…

Amazon won't win a beauty prize. Neither will most marketplaces that print money. Stop asking if your webshop looks beautiful. Ask if a customer gets it in one glance.

Open rates stopped being a real number once Apple added its privacy features. Judge your emails on clicks.

The first retention email in your store isn't a campaign. It's the order confirmation and the shipping update. The customer just paid you and is waiting for the package. That's the moment to say what happens next, what to expect, and who to reply to if something is wrong. A lot of stores leave those on the default template and then wonder why customers go quiet after the first order.

The thing I hear most from business owners about AI right now is "I'll look into it when it's a bit more mature". Sounds reasonable. I think its one of the most expensive sentences in small business this year. The tools are already good enough to take real work off your plate. What isn't ready is you. And that part only gets better by using it, badly, for a few months. Everyone is bad at it at first. Long messy questions, copy pasting stuff back and forth, getting annoyed when it misses the point. That phase doesn't get skipped because the model got smarter. The owners who started a year ago aren't smarter than you. They just already went through the awkward part.. And the gap between them and everyone still waiting gets wider every month By the time it finally feels "mature" to you, your competitor will have a year of habits you dont have. So what exactly are you waiting to happen before you start?

People think we replaced our team with AI agents. We didn't. We still have real people doing the real work. The agents get the boring stuff. The repeat tasks nobody wants. Pulling news, sorting it, first drafts, checking the same things every single day. And honestly most of what they bring back still needs a human eye. A lot of it is junk until someone tells them what good looks like. Thats the part people skip. They plug in an agent, it brings back noise, and they decide AI doesnt work.. But AI was never supposed to be the boss. Our people decide what goes out. Nothing ships without a human saying yes. Agents take the boring work off the table so the team can do the part that actually matters. So where in your business is the human still in the loop?

My rule for what goes to an agent: Would I be annoyed doing this again tomorrow? Same steps every time and a clear definition of done: agent. Needs taste or a judgment call: me. Pulling and sorting news, first drafts, checks I repeat daily all passed. Deciding what actually gets published didn't.

269 videos. 78.3 hours. Some of it client conversations. Upload it all and pay by the minute, and "a few cents" turns into another bill for data we already own. So we ran Whisper large-v3 on one Mac Studio. Nothing uploaded. No paid transcription API. Here's how it's built:

Most people I talk to are paying for 4 or 5 AI tools right now. ChatGPT, some notetaker, a writing thing, an "agent" they set up once and never opened again. And then a lead fills out their contact form on Friday afternoon and nobody answers till Tuesday.. Thats not an AI problem. Thats a business that never decided who owns the follow up. I run stores and a few newsletters with a bunch of agents doing the grunt work now. It works, but only because every piece has one job and a person who checks it. The tools were the easy part honestly. The boring part was writing down what done actually looks like for each job. If the process is a mess on paper, an agent just runs the mess faster. And you pay monthly for it So before you add tool number 6, whats the one thing in your business that still falls through the cracks every week?

Oh no. #GrokBot is down. What now? Help @elonmusk

Saved over 1200Euros doing this locally for multi language transcription.

Right now a Mac Studio in our office is transcribing a full year of our recorded conversations. Client calls and coaching sessions. 269 videos, 104 done so far. All local AI. Nothing goes to the cloud, it never leaves the building. It runs about 14x faster than real time, so 78 hours of audio takes an afternoon instead of weeks. Next step is summarizing everything into one knowledge base for the business. Every lesson we learned the hard way, searchable. Our team still decides what we do with it. The AI just does the boring part nobody ever had time for. How much of what your company knows is stuck in old calls nobody will ever rewatch?

People think we replaced our team with AI agents. We didn't. We still have real people doing the real work. The agents get the boring stuff. The repeat tasks nobody wants. Pulling news, sorting it, first drafts, checking the same things every single day. And honestly most of what they bring back still needs a human eye. A lot of it is junk until someone tells them what good looks like. Thats the part people skip. They plug in an agent, it brings back noise, and they decide AI doesnt work.. But AI was never supposed to be the boss. Our people decide what goes out. Nothing ships without a human saying yes. Agents take the boring work off the table so the team can do the part that actually matters. So where in your business is the human still in the loop?

"It's paid, so we're fine." Not quite. Authorized isn't captured. Captured can still be disputed. And Shopify's low-risk rating is not Shopify Protect coverage. Here are the 3 checks I'd run on any odd batch of AI-agent orders.

i run a few newsletters now with a small team of ai agents doing most of the grunt work. research, first drafts, design, the boring stuff. and heres what nobody tells you. the slow part isnt the ai. its me. the agents have stuff ready before i finish my coffee. then it sits there.. waiting for me to read it and say yes or no. and i made that rule on purpose. nothing goes out with my name on it unless i approved it. i'm not handing my voice to a machine and walking away. so the real skill isnt prompting anymore. its deciding fast. knowing what you want, saying no without overthinking it, and not rewriting every sentence because you feel like you have to touch it most business owners i talk to think ai will save them time. it does, but only if you can make decisions quicker than 2 days per draft. so be honest, is your ai slow, or are you the bottleneck?

been setting up a small team of ai agents to help run my newsletters, and the thing that made the biggest diffrence wasnt the model or the tools. it was sitting down and writing who each letter is actually for. 1 or 2 sentences each. who reads it, what they want from it, and what it should never turn into. without that you get drafts that are polished and generic and could of been written for anybody.. which is exactly what everyone complains about with ai. and i get it, it doesnt feel like real work so people skip it, but its pretty much the one thing the agent cant figure out on its own. so when your ai gives you mush, did you ever actually tell it who youre talking to?

been running my newsletters with a small team of ai agents for a couple months now. one finds stories, one drafts, one checks if it sounds like me. they keep going, even on weeks i barely look. sounds great, right? except now there's a pile of drafts waiting on me every morning, and the slowest part of the whole thing is me saying yes or no. i thought more output would mean faster growth. but most of my time now goes into deciding what not to send. thats a different skill than writing, and i don't think most people setting up agents are ready for it. you don't get to stop thinking, it just moves. anyone else running agents feel this too?

if you think ai is useless, you're probably the problem. not the tool. i hear it every week. "i tried chatgpt and it gave me garbage." ok, what did you ask it? usually one vague line, and then they walk away like they proved something. it's like that coworker you're not sure about. you don't trust him, so you give him half a task and no context. he comes back with something mediocre, and you think, see, told you. but you never gave him a real job. most people treat ai exactly like that. the ones getting real work out of it just explain the job. what done looks like, who it's for, what they already tried. same tool, diffrent result. what's the worst ai answer you ever got, and what did you actually ask it?

Meta's Muse agent can now check out on Shopify stores by default. Forter says agentic orders across its network grew 4x since August. So what does your team do when 13 orders from one customer land in 3 days and nobody answers the phone? I wrote down exactly what I'd check before shipping.

One customer. 13 orders in three days. All placed by an AI agent. The customer doesn’t respond. Would you ship? teapaw.org/Qorne/status/211438319…