I once spent an entire Saturday afternoon with a client trying to figure out why her handmade jewelry site wasn’t showing up on Google, even though she’d been blogging weekly for six months. Turned out she was writing genuinely good content, just for the wrong search terms entirely — she was targeting “beautiful silver rings” … Read more
A few years ago I sat down with a friend who runs a small landscaping business — great at his job, terrible at sitting still in front of a keyboard. He needed a “About Us” page, some seasonal email blasts, and captions for the truck photos he was already taking anyway. He told me writing … Read more
The first time I watched a small business owner try to manage her own Facebook and Google ad accounts, she had four browser tabs open, a half-finished spreadsheet tracking cost-per-click by hand, and the exact look on her face that I imagine people get right before they abandon a New Year’s resolution. She wasn’t bad … Read more
I still remember the exact moment I realized AI tools had quietly turned into a business opportunity, not just a novelty. A friend of mine — a laid-off graphic designer with a laptop and not much else — started charging local restaurants $150 a month to write their social media captions using ChatGPT. She wasn’t … Read more
Every few months I see another “50 AI business ideas!” list promising six figures a month from something you can supposedly launch this weekend. Most of it is noise. The AI business ideas that actually make money in 2026 aren’t secret — they’re just less exciting than the headlines: solving a specific, recurring problem for … Read more
A founder I know summed up her first year better than any framework I’ve read: “My team is me, my cofounder, and about six AI tools pretending to be a twelve-person company.” That’s not an exaggeration anymore — it’s basically the default shape of an early-stage startup in 2026. The hard part was never convincing … Read more
I get asked this one more than almost any other AI question: “I keep hitting the free ChatGPT limit — should I just pay the $20?” It sounds like a small decision, but for a lot of small business owners it’s the first real AI spend they make, and they want to know it’s not … Read more
I used to think “AI will save your business money” was one of those claims that sounds great in a pitch deck and falls apart the moment you actually try to use the tool. Then I watched a friend who runs a three-person marketing consultancy drop her bookkeeper’s monthly retainer, cut her social media scheduling … Read more
I had a conversation last month with a bookkeeper who runs a two-person shop. She’d been putting off “the AI thing” for over a year — not because she thought it was hype, but because she genuinely didn’t know if her business was actually the kind that needed it. Then she counted up how many … Read more
A client of mine spent her first year in business doing something painfully familiar: manually copying every new order from her Shopify store into a spreadsheet, then into her email list, then into a shipping tool. Three apps, one repetitive task, zero automation. When she finally set up Zapier, she told me it felt like … Read more