Just off the phone with another business owner, an existing MSP client. We are starting a paid engagement on Tuesday. He has some crews on the road installing a product. Those crews are going to start taking before, during, and after photos of the jobs, to help illustrate the transformation that this product makes. He has asked me to come up with a way to help the guys on site manage the upload of the photos and related job information - hard working guys with not an awful lot of time or much IT inclination. I then suggested.... 1. Helping his guys with his initial request ➕➕ AND ➕➕ 2. Improving the quality of the information uploaded to make it more useful 3. Automating the process of those job photos being compiled in the correct order and a social media post about the job being drafted and presented for approval of both the photographs and the content of the social media post to the business owner (style based in his previous posting history) 4. And auotomating the posting to multiple social media accounts of the photos and the approved post content. 5. He doesn't know it, but I'll throw in automatic blog post creation as a bonus. I already have a fair idea of how I'm going to do it. The key point here is I didn't sell this to him. He called me for advice about a simple technical matter and I simply suggested that the rest COULD be done, and suggested a framework only (no specific tools or much detail) He then sold himself and spontaneously decided that, despite his own AI use, he needed us to do it for him because it souned a bit complicated.

Most of you know me as "Bas's wife" 😄 (hi, yep, that's me). Some of you know. I've been quietly building something of my own, and I'm finally ready to start talking about it. Quick story. You know how a thing you love can slowly turn into a grind of admin, content, and "post or that thing disappears or it’s like it never existed." That’s a lot of pressure? For hairstylists it's brutal. Most burn out and leave before year five, not because they stopped loving the work, but because the business side eats them alive. I'm a working stylist. I lived it. So I started building the thing I always wished existed: something that quietly carries that weight so you can just do great hair and still have a life. Not another "learn how to master" tool. Pretty much the opposite. Here's the part that probably matters most to this room: I'm not a coder. I built this whole thing working with AI, learning as I went, figuring out how to actually get what was in my head out into something real. That's been its own wild ride, and honestly some of the proudest work of my life. The win: the mechanics are basically done. I've put it in front of real stylists and the reactions genuinely lit me up. Next I plan to roll out a free beta to my whole salon, 34 stylists. Now I'm staring down the part that's new to me: the launch. I know marketing (I've run local ads and coached my own clients for years), but marketing a product to stylists everywhere is a different beast than marketing services in my town. I have had years to build my voice and reputation. So I'd love to learn from people who've actually done it. If you've launched or marketed an app, I'd especially love to pick your brain on three things: 1 What did you actually do to create buzz before launch? What moved the needle, and what was a waste of time? 2 I'm planning a "Founding 100", first 100 users lock in a founder price for life. As a launch play, does that still work, or is it played out? 3. Tips and Tricks of building and audience in a shot time.

Closed my first real retainer last month and I start in three weeks!! Putting the whole plan here because I'd rather find out now what I got wrong than in month three The situation. Family holding in LatAm, retail plus financial services, several companies under it. Monthly retainer, four hours a day on site, three months to start. What they want is the stuff that lives in three or four people's heads: why decisions get made the way they do, what got tried before, what broke. Written down, and answerable in plain language. The long game is a private system per founding partner, for succession. I'm one guy. Nothing signed yet... The plan for the first 3 months: Month 1 is entirely non-technical. Map where the knowledge actually lives, which folders, which spreadsheets, whose head. Then measure a baseline before touching anything: how long it takes someone to find an answer today, how often the person who knows gets interrupted. Without that number, nothing I build later can be compared to anything Month 2, a small non-sensitive corpus goes in and a second real user starts using it. Then a hand-written eval set built with their own person. Twenty to thirty questions, expected answer, expected source document, plus negative controls where the right answer is "no record of that" Month 3 is the part I care about. Week 11 I don't open the system at all, and we count how many queries happened without me. That's the acceptance criterion, written into the contract: the designated users operate it without the consultant present. Hard to fake on purpose Three calls I made that I'm not certain about: Cloud with a zero-retention agreement instead of on-prem, even though they asked for maximum privacy. My reasoning: on-prem means weeks of importing hardware before anything exists, the models that fit in an office server are worse, and buying only makes sense once you've measured real usage. So the architecture keeps the corpus and the index on their side and treats the model as a swappable endpoint. Reversible in that direction, not the other one

Hey Clief Notes fam! 👋 I'm working my way through the new AI system and seeing what it can do. I've already posted about myself here when I first joined the group but I can most certainly add new info here. Once upon a time I knew nothing about ICM, now I have 3 whole systems that I've built, and while they may not be perfect (yet) they work and every day they get better. The best part though, is that I'm now able to show others how it works and they're benefitting too. I just asked the AI how to create a github repo (and it gave me some pretty clear instructions) and that will be my next mission. Onward and upward.

Just wanted to share a personal win. Thanks to this community! I've been in this community for a while. I am a current teacher and I've been building automations and systems for my school for the last year. This summer, I started doing AI consulting and website design. I landed my first paid client with a monthly retainer and built him a website using principles learned in this community. We are now exploring upsell ideas that will improve his business processes and offload his daily work so he can focus on delivering his service to his clients. I'm excited to continue to learn and grow in this community and see how structured approaches to AI can help me continue to develop great systems for myself and my clients, productize my own workflows, and grow my business. I've seen people in here over the months say they just went for it and that starting was the most important step. I decided to take the leap and I'm excited for what lies ahead!