A few years ago I would have told you that a small scrappy company had a big advantage. I've since changed my mind and I understand the big advantages that larger companies have. Once you get a machine rolling down a hill with 10 million or more in annual revenue, it is ON. And the rich start getting richer. The owner can afford to make investments to grow the company without skipping a family vacation that year. And so they do and they win. Why small businesses struggle: -They can't afford leads -They lose all of their people -It is expensive to get leads and they can't afford to invest before the profit comes. And all of their best people get recruited away by a bigger shop who can offer larger signing bonuses and higher pay. Ok so what now? How do I overcome this as a small company? You copy what the big dogs do. You spend money on a great website. You invest in your Google Business Profile. You spend money on SEO. You spend money on marketing. You fine tune your website so that it is VERY easy to become your customer. And you recruit and hire like a madman. You raise your prices so you can afford great people. You utilize overseas talent like the big dogs do. And you do a lot of the things that don't scale while you still can. Building bigger has a ton of benefits that I'm appreciating more and more each day.

I was quoted $10,000 to install two dehumidifiers in my crawlspace. I saved $7,500 by designing a DIY custom crawl space dehumidification system with Claude 🤑 I am not an HVAC professional. Here’s how I did it. Our story begins with the discovery that our new home needed a dehumidifier installed in the crawl space to prevent mold. The professionals told me it would cost $10k, since I’d need one unit on each end due to the size of the space, plus a second drain line installed. “Can’t we just use fans to move the humid air from one side toward the dehumidifier?” They wouldn’t do that. Enter Claude… I uploaded a floor plan of my crawl space and air volume dimensions, telling Claude what I was trying to do. It researched the best dehumidifier sized appropriately for my air volume (100 pints apparently). Found me the best price - $1,500. Now it was time for fans 💨 I had originally envisioned the single dehumidifier at one end of the space, with fans on the opposite end. Claude taught me that would just draw more moist outdoor air in through the vents on that side, creating a linear flow through the crawl space. Instead it modeled the air flow and suggested a circular vortex with 4 fans, one on each wall, in a circle. That sucks in minimal outdoor air, keeping cool dry air circulating. I told it to research appropriate fans. It found four 20” sealed bearing fans on Amazon (impervious to dust), with DC drive motors (more energy efficient than AC apparently). $120 each. 🔌 It told me to buy a smart plug for each fan and a few internet connected humidity sensors. Another $200. Claude mapped where to install everything in the crawl space. Here’s how it works - the humidity sensors monitor the crawl space air continuously. If it ever exceeds 60% humidity, the smart plugs switch on all 4 fans, circulating the air in the crawl space past the dehumidifier until the humidity is below 50% 🔃🔃🔃 Total cost ~$2,500 for everything and one Saturday of work for me. I saved $7,500 vs. the original quote because I didn’t need two dehumidifiers, and Claude tells me my version is nearly twice as energy efficient. Plus I learned a ton about my home and had fun. I didn’t know anything about dehumidifiers, fans, or air flow dynamics before starting. AI can do so much more than write code - the applications are endless.

We're about to see a new surveillance trap: "Plaid for AI" This will look like slick middleware that seamlessly hooks CRMs to Claude, gmail to GPT-5 etc, etc. UX will be great & founders well-meaning. And then the VCs will ask: what else can we do with this sick tokenflow data? And so a new generation of founders will rediscover fire: the data they route is more valuable than fees they get for routing it. Spoiler: Your ISP discovered this. And now sells your data. Financial services companies discovered this. And now sell your data. AI middleware companies are next. Because if they're routing data to inference providers, they get seeing who is querying what, when & how. Unprecedented window into thought process, tool calls, proprietary workflows. Already a scarce, valuable resource mostly available to the big inference providers (key part of their moat!). Only going to be more so. But it also smells like commercial insight, business & market intelligence for days... So, you build in surveillance and monetization becomes your big defensible margin. And then one day the warrants arrive... Or maybe you've been clever and, despite some founder discomfort that the VCs pushed through, you just quietly built a for-government dashboard during your Series C...